He was free, free in every way, free to behave like a fool or a machine, free to accept, free to refuse, free to equivocate; to marry, to give up the game, to drag this death weight about with him for years to come. He could do what he liked, no one had the right to advise him, there would be for him no Good or Evil unless he thought them into being. — Jean-Paul Sartre, L’âge de raison (The Age of Reason, 1945)

After having an especially anxious month, I started buying a plethora of books and reading voraciously in an attempt to assuage my mental funk. After a few duds, I landed on Sarah Bakewell’s Existentialist Café, partly due to my current obsession with Paris. Judging from the cover alone, I expected a relatively light read, detailing the idiosyncratic personal histories of some of the greatest European philosophers of the 20^th century. What I did not expect was to be confronted with some home truths about my generation and the way we are shaping culture.

At its core, existentialism is both a cultural movement and philosophy that emphasizes personal freedom. Spearheaded in the mid-twentieth century by thinkers such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the theory places responsibility totally in the hands of the individual, giving each and every one of us agency over the decisions we make throughout our lives–“existence precedes essence.” The pressure is enough to give anyone heart palpitations, especially those just entering the adult world.

It will come as no surprise to anyone that anxiety among teens and twenty-somethings is on the rise. It is practically impossible to go a single day without reading an article or a news bulletin detailing the latest crises in the mental health of young people, driven by a culture of achievement and a world that threatens individual safety.

Blame for this phenomenon is usually cast onto social media.  As almost every aspect of our lives are now being tracked, recorded and turned into data, this argument has some merit. Apps such as Instagram can incite undue stress as a consequence of their compelling comparative nature. “… [S]elf esteem–and worldview–becomes connected to… posts.” Indeed, overexposure frequently leads to hermit-like retreats into duvets and Netflix, shutting out the world.

Yet to accuse social media alone of causing this generational trend is too reductive. Simply pointing the finger neglects to take into account the role played by the individual and their own existentialist freedom in inciting anxiety.

As our society becomes more and more interconnected, ironically, people are being more and more introspective. Rarely does a week go by where I don’t have a conversation with a friend, consoling them as they tell me how stuck they are feeling, how anxious they feel about the fact that their life is not moving forward fast enough. I often catch myself in the same pernicious thought loop. I will be agonizing over the fact that I haven’t achieved anything in the past week or the fact that I am not doing something during every waking moment of everyday. 

Social media is a vehicle for these thoughts, but ultimately it the abundance of freedom that is the driver of the subsequent malaise. No one forces an individual to endlessly scroll, to stay up for hours just to stare at a florescent screen. We choose to do so, irrespective of the fact that we risk coming across a picture or tweet that will elicit deep-seated feelings of envious desire, thoughts of, “Why not me?”

“It is sometimes suggested,” says the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “That existentialism… is this bygone cultural movement rather than an identifiable philosophical position.” It’s no wonder that the term “existential crisis” has entered popular culture as a punchline, a flippant way for individuals to explain why they have been in a funny mood all day. However, the generational misunderstanding of the tenets of existentialism are at play in 21st-century anxiety experienced by my generation.

What the term really highlights is the inability of people to put the phone down and just take a breath without explaining what they are doing and why. Even those individuals who do manage to remove themselves from the digital social sphere have to occupy themselves with something else to justify their absence. 

The anxiety charging this dynamic is beginning to define our culture. Everything has to have a greater meaning beyond its mere existence. Everyone seems desperate to label themselves and define their actions by something more than simply what they are. Our understanding of “freedom” is inadvertently constraining us, overwhelming us with choice. Bringing wave after wave of exasperation and stress, we are constantly worried about making the wrong decision, fatalistic about the repercussions our decisions will have on the rest of our lives.

When I share my thoughts with those of my parents’ and grandparents’ generations, I find that they rarely had these concerns at my age – or were at least able to compartmentalize them. Life for them was a set of milestones, predetermined by their background and education. They were not blindsided everyday with images of the dramatically romantic lives lived by their “peers”: video and stills screaming, “This is what you should be doing/wearing/eating/watching.” They had a clearly defined structure–the here and now–less influenced by externalities.

My generation seems to have done the exact opposite, blaming ourselves for every perceived failure, every apparent lack, when the idea of freedom is the recognition that you are the sum of your choices and that you can start fresh with a new perspective.

If we fail to recognize and reawaken the tenets of existentialism, we are setting ourselves up to fail in dramatic style. If we ever hope to re-orientate ourselves, we must take control of our freedom. Choice can be a burden, but it is a fundamentally positive one. No one gets to choose the world, but everyone gets choose how they fit into it. Such a task, whatever way you look at it, cannot be undertaken behind a screen.