Anxiety

Existential Crisis Is A Good Thing

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There’s no question that the feelings around existential crises are painful. Nobody enjoys feeling lost and anxious. The state is difficult to bear and it’s understandable to want the whole situation to pass as quickly as possible in order to get back to the business of everyday life.

But an existential crisis is a good thing in that it’s you, from the deepest recesses of your being, telling yourself that you can no longer go along with your current practice of life, that something fundamental needs to shift in order for you to derive meaning and fulfillment out of your short time on the planet.

Rather than being your enemy an existential crisis is your friend, a pushy friend who puts you on the spot and refuses to accept any of your rationalizations and excuses, but a friend nonetheless. It spurs you to make the important and necessary changes that you probably wouldn’t make otherwise. Complacency is an enemy of self-actualization, existential crisis is an enemy of complacency, therefore existential crisis is an ally of self-actualization.

When you think in these terms you’ll view your own existential crises through a different lens. You’ll realize your painful, anxious feelings aren’t the problem, the life situation that has inspired them is the problem. Without these feelings you wouldn’t take the time to analyze that life situation. We have an impossibly tiny window as human beings to fulfill our personal destinies, to turn our possibilities into realities. When we recognize that existential crises are important guideposts in the journey we no longer feel antipathy towards them and in fact feel gratitude instead.

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