I am ignoring religious forms of existentialism here. I'd prefer if they were called something other than existentialism.
Existentialism says that life has no meaning in itself. It turns to the self. It says the self can impose meaning and value on life. I have to be free, and my own person, and not let others impose meaning on me.
[Some say you should not impose meaning on your self but on your life. Surely your self is your life, and vice versa? The difference is that the self is your idea of who you are and what you like. Life is just existing. Another angle is that the self is about interpretation, and life is just a fact and is not. To impose meaning on life that is not there is effectively treating life as a tool. An analogy would be how you force your business to be what you want it to be. It becomes a thing to help you feel important.
Imposing implies that you need to be forceful. It is not about sitting back. You can only be forceful by being willing to tell others to stay out of your business. You have to protect your space. This will make you enemies. Make no mistake. None of it is going to be easy. It means maintaining a high level of individualism, which is against every religion and cult.]
Existentialism says that there is nothing out there that might give your life meaning. There is no God to do it. If you use faith in God to give yourself meaning, the real faith is in yourself. It would be more honest and responsible to just simply give the faith to yourself instead of this roundabout fantasy.
[Now, even if there were a God, we are told he has to deal with evil and bring good from it. He has a plan. The notion that God must bestow a sense of meaning on all is untrue. His plan might mean he cannot give my life meaning. But your life might be a different story. It is an overstatement to say that you must have faith in God and a relationship with him to give your life meaning. Existentialism simply goes a step further. Rather than some having meaning, not all, it says nobody has, and must get it from the self and not from a God.]
Existentialism is accused of valuing authenticity, as in being totally free to be yourself, while this absolute freedom is a lie and delusion. No matter how free you try to be, it backfires. For example, shutting others out to be a loner means you rob yourself of help if you take a heart attack in the house.
One way to impose meaning is to keep life about the present moment.
Make your choice now and for now, and that is your absolute freedom.
Learn to make the choice you face. If I face choice A and choice B
now, I have all the absolute freedom I need. It is absolute freedom
to me.
Freedom depends on what you want in the first place. Being free on a
small beach can be more free than having a whole paradise planet.
The backfire argument is based on a straw man.
Now imagine the crazy absolute freedom as the critics define it. It may not be possible. But it does not mean you cannot be as free as possible. Absolute freedom depends on what context you make. You make it within a framework. Absolute freedom is when you want the choice between ice cream and mineral water on the beach, and you set up that choice. Why would we call you unfree just because you cannot wave a magic wand to turn the salt water into drinking water?
So we literally cannot have a complete freedom free-for-all. That does not mean we should or should not. The brick falling on me does not mean it should fall. I should be able to jump off an exploding skyscraper and not hurt myself, though it cannot happen. That is not relevant to my life. It does not matter. But it matters in principle. That is why a God who limits me should not be worshipped.
An existentialist is said to believe we are all born as blank
slates. Not all do. Let us speak about the brand of existentialism
that emphasizes blank slate theory. The slate starts to get marked
with the chalk. The more life is lived, the more that the marks
change. We form. We grow. We learn.
Is blank slate true? Does it matter? How does it affect the God
notion? Well, others will influence you in ways you cannot even
notice to get you to do what they want when it should be about what
you want. If you want to get into somebody’s business, without them
even noticing, then use God as a cover. Tell them God is responding
to them in their hearts and by what happens around them. That plants
a self-fulfilling mechanism in them that may be enough to get them
under your spell. They must overcome this imposition.
This brings us to the subject of rights. Maybe rights do not exist, and we just have existential responsibility. What would the difference be? [Some use the term rights when they mean existential responsibility.] A right is yours whether you want it to be or not. If you take that view, you will define rights as what the state or society gives to you and says you need. But answering only to yourself implies that you make your own rights. You decree them. In a universe without meaning, you have to create your own idea of rights for yourself. That is existential responsibility.
Christians tell you that God loves each person, and Jesus went as far as to say God treasures every bird and flower. They say that the universe is big and we are small, but its size has nothing to do with how important we are or are not.
Thoughts arise.
One is that I am more likely to have appeared by chance in such a big universe.
Two, surely I don't think that hypothetically if I could vamoose the universe and live alone, that maybe I should. If there were a choice between all people going out of existence and the universe, do I really think the universe should go?
Three, the universe remains bigger than me no matter how important I am supposed to be. I cannot do anything about the position of a stone in a world light years away. So I am not so important after all.
Four, if God treasures every form of life, the flower and the bird, maybe he equates them with us. As God supposedly has a plan and evil gets in the way, we are told that it is a mysterious one. So the fact that God makes us dominate his creatures does not necessarily mean he thinks we are better.
Now love is action. Action speaks. Action does not speak louder than words. It is what you should have even if it means there are no words or they are not said. Action needs to replace words. God is all-powerful and can set up a universe where he can prove he loves me as if there were no other. He cannot—therefore, his love for me is thin and unconvincing. God is definitely a fake solution to the so-called problem of what the meaning of life is. If existentialism is unappealing, God is not really any better. If you don't want to create meaning for what you do and for your life, God or atheism won't absolve you from that. Do it.
APPENDIX: LOVECRAFT AND COSMICISM
H. P. Lovecraft exhibited an attitude called Cosmicism. It highlights what existentialism also grapples with: we are nothing in the cosmic scale. Religion counters by saying God’s love gives us meaning—but this still acknowledges our inherent smallness. If meaning comes from something outside of us, we’re like parasites, borrowing value we don't possess.
And what if our vast universe is just a speck in a larger multiverse? What if some godlike being created it as a trivial experiment? That seems absurd only because we underestimate the possible scale of reality.
Ultimately, our egos shrink the universe to make room for our own importance. We make our suffering feel like cosmic tragedy and downplay the universe’s vastness. In doing so, we twist Cosmicism into its opposite—exalting ourselves at the expense of reality, and often, at the expense of others.
We don’t just inflate our own importance—we do it with our tribes, families, and nations. Even when we claim to accept our smallness, we still react to personal misfortune as if it’s the end of the world. Some say that it’s a coping mechanism: if we truly accepted our insignificance, the weight of it would be unbearable. But the opposite can be true as well. We can get relief from seeing how small we are. And indeed that should be the default.