How to Practice Existentialism

Question

Philosophy is often assumed to be an academic exercise — you read the texts, learn the arguments, and discuss them in seminars. But the existentialists insisted that their philosophy was meant to be lived, not merely studied. Sartre wrote novels and plays to show existentialism in action; Camus insisted that the question of suicide was not theoretical but the most urgent practical question anyone faces; Kierkegaard wrote pseudonymously to force readers into their own existential decisions rather than absorbing someone else's conclusions. If existentialism is a practical philosophy, what does it look like to practice it? What concrete exercises, drawn from the tradition, can someone perform in the course of an ordinary day?

Quick Answer

Practicing existentialism means turning its central insights into recurring disciplines. The first is the Choice exercise, drawn from Sartre: at regular intervals, examine the decisions you have made and ask whether you are owning them or hiding behind necessity. The second is the Absurd Walk, drawn from Camus: step outside the framework of meaning you habitually inhabit and confront the raw, indifferent physical world, letting the encounter strip away false certainties. The third is the Anxiety Practice, drawn from Kierkegaard: when dread arises, do not flee it but stay with it, reading it as a disclosure of your freedom and the weight of your possibilities. The fourth is Amor Fati, drawn from Nietzsche: practice affirming your life exactly as it has been, not in passive resignation but in active embrace. The fifth is the Being-toward-Death meditation, drawn from Heidegger: periodically bring your own mortality to mind, not to brood but to sharpen the urgency of the present. The sixth is the Commitment practice, drawn from Simone de Beauvoir: identify the values you claim to hold and act on them, without waiting for proof that the action will succeed.

None of these exercises promises tranquility or happiness in the conventional sense. They promise something more demanding and, to the existentialist mind, more valuable: the experience of living a life that is genuinely your own, chosen rather than drifted into, faced rather than evaded. The Stoics, whose daily practices share a family resemblance to these, aimed at ataraxia — the tranquility that comes from aligning with the order of things. The existentialists, who reject the very idea of a cosmic order to align with, aim instead at authenticity — the resolute ownership of a freedom that nothing grounds and nothing guarantees.

Historical Wisdom

Each of these exercises has a philosophical lineage. Sartre's Choice exercise descends directly from his analysis of bad faith in Being and Nothingness. Bad faith, Sartre argued, is the attempt to flee the anguish of freedom by treating oneself as a thing — determined by role, character, or circumstance. The famous example is the waiter who moves with exaggerated precision, playing at being a waiter as though the role were his essence. The exercise is to catch yourself in analogous performances: the dutiful employee who has "no choice" but to comply, the faithful partner who is "just that kind of person," the anxious person who "cannot help" their habits. Sartre's point is not that roles and habits are bad but that disowning them as choices is a lie. The waiter can be a waiter authentically — but only if he acknowledges that he is choosing, each day, to be one.

Camus's Absurd Walk grows out of the opening pages of The Myth of Sisyphus, where he describes the moment when the mechanical rhythm of daily life cracks and the question "why?" rises up unbidden. You are commuting, working, eating, sleeping — and suddenly the whole routine looks alien, arbitrary, stripped of the meaning that habit had lent it. Camus did not see this moment as a crisis to be resolved but as a clarity to be inhabited. The Absurd Walk is the deliberate cultivation of this rupture: stepping outside, attending to the physical world — the sky, the stone, the silence — and letting the encounter with an indifferent universe strip away the false meanings that cushion daily life. Camus found this clarity not in abstraction but in the body: in swimming, in the sun, in the feel of the Algerian shore. The exercise is physical, not merely intellectual.

Kierkegaard's Anxiety Practice comes from his 1844 work The Concept of Anxiety, where he analyzed anxiety as the "dizziness of freedom." The self stands at the edge of possibility, and the sheer openness of what could be produces a vertigo that is not fear of any specific thing but the awareness that nothing necessitates any particular choice. Kierkegaard saw this not as pathology but as the mark of spirit — the sign that the self is free and therefore responsible. The practice is to resist the temptation to convert anxiety into fear of something specific (which can be managed, avoided, or medicated) and instead to sit with the free-floating dread, reading it as a compass that points toward the weight of one's own possibility.

Nietzsche's Amor Fati appears in The Gay Science (1882): "I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful." This is not the Stoic acceptance of fate but an active, creative affirmation — the will to love your life so completely that you would will it again, exactly as it was, for all eternity. Heidegger's Being-toward-Death meditation, from Being and Time, is the practice of anticipating one's own death not as a future event but as a present possibility that individualizes existence and strips away the trivial concerns of the "they." And de Beauvoir's Commitment practice, drawn from The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947), insists that freedom is not merely negative — freedom from — but positive: freedom to disclose the world through projects that embody one's values. To practice commitment is to refuse the comfort of holding values without acting on them.

Different Cultural Perspectives

The existentialist exercises bear an instructive resemblance to practices in other traditions, and the comparison reveals what is distinctive about each. The Stoics, as noted, developed a rich set of daily exercises — morning meditation, negative visualization, the evening review — that share the existentialist emphasis on self-examination and finitude. Marcus Aurelius begins his Meditations by reminding himself that he will die, and Seneca wrote that we should live as though death were imminent. The Being-toward-Death meditation has a clear Stoic ancestor. But the Stoic exercises aim at tranquility through alignment with cosmic reason, while the existentialist exercises aim at intensity through the acknowledgment that there is no cosmic order to align with. The Stoic meditates on death to reduce fear; the existentialist meditates on death to increase urgency.

Buddhist mindfulness practice also resembles the existentialist exercises, particularly in its attention to the present moment and its refusal to escape into abstraction. But where Buddhist meditation aims at the dissolution of the self and the cessation of suffering, existentialist practice aims at the intensification of the self and the full embrace of suffering as part of what it means to be free. The Buddhist watches thoughts arise and pass without attachment; the existentialist watches choices arise and claims them with attachment — because the claiming is the point. Both traditions value lucidity, but they diverge on what lucidity is for: liberation from the self or liberation of the self.

The monastic tradition of Christian meditation — particularly the practice of memento mori, remembering death — also parallels Heidegger's Being-toward-Death. But the Christian practice directs the practitioner toward God and eternity, using mortality as a reminder to prepare the soul for judgment. Heidegger's practice, stripped of theology, directs the practitioner toward the finitude of this life, using mortality as a reminder that this life is the only one and that its choices are irrevocable. The form is similar; the telos is opposite.

Practical Lessons

How do you actually perform these exercises? Start with the Choice exercise. Pick a regular moment — your morning coffee, your commute, the end of the day — and run through your recent decisions. For each one, ask: did I choose this, or did I tell myself I had no choice? If you find yourself saying "I had to," press on it. What would have happened if you had refused? The answer is rarely that the world would have ended; it is usually that some cost — social, financial, emotional — would have been incurred. Owning the choice does not mean changing it; it means admitting that you weighed the cost and decided to pay it rather than the alternative. This admission is the difference between living and drifting.

The Absurd Walk is best practiced outdoors, in motion. Go for a walk without a destination, and as you walk, try to see the world as though you had no framework for understanding it. The buildings, the trees, the strangers passing by — not as "city" or "nature" or "people" but as sheer physical presence, indifferent to your categories. Camus found this experience most powerfully in the encounter between the human body and the natural world, and you can replicate it in any setting where the rawness of physical reality breaks through the web of social meaning. The point is not to conclude that nothing matters but to experience the groundlessness that underlies the meanings we habitually project, and then to return to your life with that groundlessness in view — not as despair but as freedom.

The Anxiety Practice requires no special setting. The next time you feel a diffuse, objectless dread — the kind that has no clear cause and resists practical remedy — do not try to distract yourself, rationalize it away, or convert it into fear of something manageable. Sit with it. Ask: what is this dread disclosing? Kierkegaard's answer is that it discloses your freedom — the fact that nothing determines your next move, that you stand before an open horizon of possibility and must choose without a rule. The practice is to let the anxiety do its work of disclosure, and then to act — not from the anxiety but in its light, with the awareness that your choice is yours and no one else's.

Amor Fati is perhaps the most demanding exercise, because it asks you to affirm not only the good in your life but the painful, the regrettable, the seemingly unnecessary. Nietzsche's test is extreme: would you will this life again, in every detail, for all eternity? You need not pass the test to practice the exercise. Begin smaller: take one thing you resent — a failure, a loss, a limitation — and try to see it not as an obstacle to the life you wanted but as a constitutive part of the life you have. The practice is not to pretend the pain was good but to refuse the posture of resentful wishing — the "if only" that keeps you at war with your own history. Viktor Frankl, working in a different but related tradition, made a similar point: meaning is found not in avoiding suffering but in the stance one takes toward unavoidable suffering.

The Being-toward-Death meditation can be practiced as a structured reflection. Once a week, spend ten minutes bringing your own death to mind — not abstractly, but concretely. Imagine the last conversation, the last meal, the last morning. Then return to the present and ask: what does this day look like from the standpoint of its finitude? What matters more from that perspective, and what matters less? The exercise is not meant to produce sadness but clarity — the clarity that comes from knowing that time is not infinite and that every "someday" is a bet against an uncertain future. Finally, the Commitment practice: name one value you hold — justice, honesty, creativity, love — and identify one concrete action you can take this week that embodies it. Do not wait until you are certain the action will work. De Beauvoir's point is that commitment without guarantee is the only kind there is, and that to refuse it is to refuse your own freedom.

Further Reading

To explore the thinkers behind these practices, visit Sartre, Camus, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Heidegger. For a companion guide focused on the underlying philosophy of authentic living, see How to Live Authentically. The Existentialist Wisdom collection gathers the central texts, while Understanding Yourself places these practices in the broader context of self-examination. For a comparison with a tradition that shares the emphasis on daily practice, see How to Practice Stoicism.