What is existential depression and could you have it? About a year ago I had no idea what it was. At the same time, I also didn’t know that I was experiencing it.
Existential depression is a feeling of meaningless as if your life has no purpose. Last year I reached this point after money troubles triggered me into asking the big questions we have about life. It wasn’t long until I started obsessing over them in an unhealthy way.
I wondered; “If this existence is so difficult, why should I bother at all, what’s the point in all of this?” Questions like this plagued my mind for months.
The uprising of existential questions
When you are a child you have a very narrow view of the world around you. Most of your decisions are taken by your parents and you only really see what they want you to see and know.
It is kind of a bliss-like state of ignorance. Life is generally pretty positive and the only questions you have are the immediate ones that affect your daily life – ‘what’s for dinner?’ and ‘what am I going to wear today?’
If you’re lucky, you have two parents that love you unconditionally and do a good job of preserving your innocence. However, we know that this cannot last forever because we must all get older.
Whilst you gain more personal freedom as you grow into a teenager and finally an adult, the bubble you once lived inside begins to evaporate as you experience more influences from the world around you.
Soon enough, you find out that not everyone has your best interests at heart, not everyone wants to get along, and there are real dangers out there that you have to be aware of.
You learn that there are responsibilities you have to personally uphold and your questions about what you’re going to eat for dinner or what shirt you’re going to wear on Saturday become more and more irrelevant.
In place of these simple child-like questions are bigger ones. Sometimes they’re triggered by events in your life, but most people end up having these questions naturally as they get older.
Growing into an adult means struggling to find your own place in the world. Where do you belong? what should you be doing?
It feels as if you must understand existence first if you’re going to find your place inside of it. Whilst it is natural to question the meaning of your existence, for some, it can lead to deeper, more intense questions that can lead to existential depression.
And that is exactly what happened to me. If I’m honest, I feel like I’ve experienced existential depressive episodes for most of my life. However, this intensified last year when it felt as if everything I was doing was pointless.
I had money troubles and took it as a sign that I was failing. That’s when the switch in my brain flipped.
“I’ve always been in this sort of perpetual state of existential longing. I feel like something is missing”.
Juliana Hatfield
I have always felt as if something is missing. Somehow, this event triggered me into deep thought. The problem is, I’ve always known the thing that is missing is answers, answers to questions that can never really be answered.
It is a type of self-torture when you forever long for the answers to “the point of all of this” and the “why’s”.
Yalom’s Big Four Reasons
Whilst some may feel panicked by existential depression, some people find comfort and happiness in the big mysteries of life. So what’s causing some of us to ‘freak out?’
Popular psychiatrist Ivan Yalom describes in his book Existential Psychotherapy that there appear to be four main reasons or roots for this type of thinking;
Death
Death is something we all think about from time to time, some more than others. As a child death is not something you give a lot of time to. In fact, it can even seem like something that is made up by grown-ups to scare you. It feels so alien that you put it to the back of your mind.
As you get older, you see people die that you know and love and death ends up being a larger part of your life. It’s understandable that death can cause a sense of existential depression because of its finality.
Freedom
Yalom describes the concept of freedom as something that can cause existential negative thoughts. For example, as a child, you feel free and full of potential. As you get older, you get locked into jobs, bills, and relationships.
We have spent centuries fighting for freedom and yet we struggle with what true freedom really is. If we are locked to these things, are we really free?
Isolation
Have you ever felt like you truly know someone inside and out? As animals, we are defined by how we interact with others and the company we keep. Perhaps we struggle with isolation even in the busiest of crowds.
For example, we can become very close to those around us yet we can never truly experience what they experience. We can never see through their eyes or feel how they feel. Based on these examples, we can never truly know someone.
We enter this world on our own and we leave it on our own.
Meaninglessness
Meaninglessness is a combination of the three items described above. Without meaning, in our lives, we sometimes think; “what’s the point?” And this is a fair thought.
Because we can never truly know what our purpose or meaning is in our day to day lives and on a larger scale, also as a species, we can fall into spiraling thoughts of existential crisis.
The meaninglessness in my own existence came to a head last year when I finally had an inner crisis.
“Why was I born? Simply for my parents’ joy?”
“What is the point of doing anything if I am only going to die one day?”
“Why do things have to be so hard when there’s no point to any of this anyway?”
Why doesn’t everyone have an existential crisis?
So why do some people get affected by this and others not? Some believe that it is most likely to manifest in those that are gifted, as in, those who are able to see the injustices in the world in a way that others cannot.
Of course, it’s difficult to define ‘gifted’ but it seems to me that people who are more aware of circumstances and the lack of balance in society may then manifest higher thoughts about the meaning on their own lives.
The creatives
Although there seem to be certain types of people who experience existential depression, I have my own hypothesis on those who may be more likely to get it; creative people.
Why do I think this? You only have to look at some of the great artists of the past and present. It’s the people who ask questions, that are curious and that think on a larger creative scale than those who just go through the motions.
Gifted maybe, but definitely creative. Creative people feel as if their work is never done. They crave the next high of creating something beautiful, that will finally give them satisfaction. Writers, painters, singers, become obsessed with the next level, the next fix of creative flow.
These people are deep thinkers. They are often the types of people who torture themselves with existential questions about their own place in the universe.
These creatives are often very philosophical in some way, struggling to answer never-ending questions.
Whatever the reason you may experience existential depression, it’s no laughing matter as it can destroy your ability to enjoy life for what it is. Existential depression ruins the joy of the present moment.
Existential depression symptoms
- low energy
- a lack of interest in most things
- feelings of meaningless
- feelings of disconnection and isolation
- lack of patience in normal social situations
- depression or low mood
- feeling numb
Overcoming existential depression
Overcoming existential depression can be difficult but here’s how you can start based on my own experience;
Talk to someone
It sounds too simple but it’s the best thing you can do. Having these thoughts made me feel incredibly isolated. I felt like I was the only one in the world having these thoughts and felt kind of stupid to admit I was having them. After all, people have these kinds of passing thoughts every now and again but to admit you’re obsessing over them can be scary.
Talking with family members helped me a great deal. Although I still felt like I had an ‘existential crisis hangover’ it was comforting to know that others had had these thoughts from time to time.
Accept existential thoughts
Much like when I talk about anxiety, accepting that there will always be unanswered questions is key. As I described above, having these thoughts about the meaning of your existence is like a kind of self-torture.
There are things that are out of our control, no matter how much we think about them and try to solve them. Acceptance is an easy word to throw around but it is truly the only way to tackle existential thoughts head-on.
Spending time trying to tackling these existential questions about life is like trying to push a one-tonne boulder up a hill.
Luckily for me, these thoughts eased down after I tackled the things that were causing me to feel this way. Sure, they’ll come back from time to time but I’m learning to be okay with that. As I grow older and become more influenced by the world around me, I’m sure they’ll be deeper questions that arise but by talking about and accepting these will only help.
Grieve if you need to
If you’ve suffered a loss or a strategy in your life then you need to give yourself a chance to grieve. Likewise, if your life has changed and it’s forced you to change too, you might need to grieve. For example, I used to long for my teenage years because they seemed to be such simple days. I didn’t want to grow up and face the difficult questions we all have to face as we grow older.
I didn’t want the responsibility of adulthood and still felt like a child at heart. I had to grieve that loss and move on or I was going to be stuck feeling depressed about it.
Summarising existential depression
Existential depression is something that can take control of your whole life. I couldn’t think about anything other than the point of my life and it affected everything that I did. From work to my relationships, I was fed up feeling as if nothing mattered.
Existential depression is a little taboo because its very nature is something we all think about from time to time but most of us don’t dwell on the big questions about life. Most of us move on with our lives and carry on with the things that are important to us, the things that we can actually control.
If you find yourself dwelling on the big questions about your life, I’d advise you to focus on the things that you care about instead because those are the things that can give your life meaning.
Sean C is a writer, passionate about improving one’s self by maintaining healthy habits and doing the things that make life more meaningful.