Four Flavors of Existential Despair

Despair is defined as a complete loss of hope. Many of us experience despair over the course of a lifetime—after a loss, a traumatic event, or a prolonged period of difficulty. But for some, the root of despair is the state of life itself.

The nature of existence is a difficult problem to parse emotionally. Mainly because we are enfolded and surrounded by the facts of existence. There is no retreat. You can’t get any distance from the problem to gain perspective.

Existential despair can also be quite isolating. It seems impossible to explain to your loved ones that yes, you are perhaps a bit depressed. But it isn’t because of a bad job or a tough breakup—it’s because you are haunted by a question: What does it all mean?

To be able to adequately address a problem, you first must be able to name it. To help you along your journey towards reclaiming hope, I would like to share five different versions of existential despair. Each comes with its own special flavor of suffering—and its own particular remedy.

The despair of losing the thing to which you’ve dedicated your life.

You’ve spent your life orbiting one goal. Maybe you spent years in training for a particular career or sunk your internal resources into an important relationship. This work imbued your life with purpose and meaning. As long as you were working towards your goal, your life felt meaningful.

But then, through some twist of fate—an illness, a breakup, a market crash—your goal is permanently out of reach, never to be recovered. Your shining star of ambition has collapsed into a black hole. The years of hard work and struggle seem meaningless, wasted. And your future stretches out in front of you, barren of purpose.

You’ve imagined your life would be a linear highway, heading towards a single destination. Instead, it’s more like a meandering gravel road with many roundabouts, detours, and dead ends. And occasionally, you aren’t even driving the car. It is okay. This is as it should be. Give your life permission to change.

Think of the experience and skills you’ve gained along the way. Perhaps you won’t get to use them in the way that you imagined. That does not mean that they are useless. Give yourself time and space to imagine a new life for yourself, where you use your acquired wisdom for a new purpose.

The despair of seeing your existence as vapid and meaningless.

Getting up, going to work, tapping your screens, watching your TV shows. Feeding yourself, cleaning the kitchen, going to bed at a reasonable time. These are the repetitive actions that make up a life. Every day, we share in the collective, sometimes joyful, sometimes menial, work of living.

The daily grind of living can become rich soil for existential despair. You picture the universe, infinite, ever-expanding. You picture yourself, an achingly small blip in the timeline of earth. How can your existence have any significance? It seems impossible to live a life of meaning when your life is so very small.

Looking at the world from this angle makes everything look empty. That promotion you’ve been working so hard for at work seems like a vapid, silly pursuit. Why does it matter if your boss thinks you’re smart when we don’t even know if we’re the only habitable planet in the unknown universe?

My suggestion is to radically accept the fact that you will never know your significance to existence. This knowledge is simply never going to be available to you. You will never be able to assess how big or small your life is. Take the pressure off!

Graciously take on the role in which you find yourself, leaving room for the mystery of how exactly you’ve been cast this part. Find pleasure in the menial tasks of caring for yourself, because caring for yourself is the work of a life. Focus on the small ways you play a role in your family, your community, the planet. Find value in the small ways you ease and enrich the world around you.

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The despair of realizing that any bad thing can happen to anyone at any moment.

Humans need to feel safe. Our neurological systems are wired towards the goal of safety. There are so many things in the world to make us feel safe: houses, hugs, a fridge full of groceries, a reportedly low-crime neighborhood.

Then trauma or tragedy strikes your life and shatters your sense of safety. Perhaps a young, seemingly healthy acquaintance is diagnosed with a progressive, incurable disease. Perhaps one of your loved ones is taken by a senseless, violent event.

Suddenly, the cushion of safety you’ve wrapped around your life reveals itself as a flimsy, transparent sham. How can anyone ever feel safe in this world, you might wonder, when terrible tragedies can happen to anyone, despite their best efforts to remain healthy and whole?

The way we cope with this terrifying fact depends on what frame we put on the problem. We can spend every day in fear, anxiously trying to control our lives to the point where we feel safe —which by the way, never quite works. Or, we can accept the fact that our lives are fragile.

We can use this knowledge to imbue each moment of safety with special meaning. The food in the fridge, the roof over our head, a boring day where nothing bad happens—these things are not commonplace. They are miraculous. Each day we are granted the ability to live with ease and safety is a blessing, not to be taken for granted.

The despair of coping (badly) with the inevitability of death.

There’s one fact of life we can’t ignore: It ends. I will die, you will die, my dog will die, our loved ones will die. Most of us keep this well-proven fact locked in a tiny box in the back of our minds. We don't like to open that box because when we do, we are flooded with the unbearable inevitability of our own impending doom.

The eventuality of death is difficult enough to imagine. But then there's the problem of what happens after. Your hypotheses for the afterlife, or lack thereof, probably draw from your religious and cultural background. Even if you're confident in what happens after death, the exact process remains mysterious, and therefore anxiety-provoking.

And yet, I would like to suggest that calmly examining the inevitability of your death will improve your life. Instead of studiously avoiding the idea of death, allow yourself to gently face it. This is best done calmly, well-rested, on a full stomach. Spiritual communities provide support and accompaniment for this process so you don't become overwhelmed.

Here is the objective of this terrifying process: By accepting that you will die, you are accepting that you are now, very much so alive. By anticipating the grief of what you will lose in your death, you gain gratitude for what you have in life.

Suddenly, a boring day spent waiting in line at the bank and eating mediocre takeout becomes something illuminated—precious time spent in your physical body, interacting with people, nourishing your life. Making peace with the fact that your life will end lends your daily experiences sweetness.

Accepting the difficult, confusing, finite nature of existence can be a path into despair. But, it can also be a path into gratitude, empowerment, and enjoyment. Proceed with courage and tenderness.