When Existence Precedes Essence: How an Old Philosophy Speaks to Our AI-Driven Age
In an era when algorithms predict our preferences before we know them themselves, when artificial intelligence increasingly shapes the contours of our daily lives, a 19th-century Danish philosopher's radical assertion feels startlingly contemporary: existence precedes essence.
This is the central claim of existentialism—a philosophical movement that emerged as a counterweight to industrial conformity and has only grown more relevant as we navigate the paradoxes of the 21st century. And as we stand at the precipice of the fourth industrial revolution, its message may be more urgent than ever.
The Birth of a Philosophy Against the Machine
The story begins in 1840s Copenhagen, where Søren Kierkegaard, a melancholic philosopher with piercing eyes and an even more piercing intellect, posed a question that would reverberate through the next two centuries: What does it mean to be human in a world that treats humans as interchangeable parts?
Kierkegaard was writing in the shadow of the Industrial Revolution. Factories were multiplying. Division of labor was fragmenting human work into mechanical repetition. Mass media was beginning to homogenize thought and taste. The individual—that sacred unit of human dignity—seemed to be dissolving into the crowd.
His answer would not come until decades later, refined through the philosophical work of Martin Heidegger in 1920s Germany, and ultimately popularized by Jean-Paul Sartre in post-World War II Paris. But the core insight remained constant: unlike a chair, which is designed for a specific purpose before it exists, human beings are not born with a predetermined essence. We exist first. We create our essence through our choices.
The Radical Freedom of Being Human
This distinction—seemingly abstract—carries revolutionary implications.
A chair exists to be sat upon. A hammer exists to drive nails. Their essence precedes their existence. They have no choice in the matter. But humans? We are born into the world without instruction manual, without predetermined purpose. We must choose who we become. This is not a privilege. It is a burden. Sartre called it "radical freedom," and he meant it as both liberation and terror.
"We are our choices," Sartre insisted. And this means we cannot escape responsibility by claiming we were made this way, or that society forced us, or that circumstances left us no alternative. We are, in his famous formulation, "condemned to be free."
The Existential Crisis of Our Time
The existentialists emerged in response to a specific historical moment: the dehumanizing forces of industrial mass production. Workers became cogs. Consumers became demographics. Individuals became statistics.
But look around today. The pressure toward uniformity has not diminished—it has intensified beyond anything Kierkegaard or Sartre could have imagined.
Social media algorithms learn your preferences and feed you more of the same, narrowing your world even as it appears to expand. Artificial intelligence systems are trained on the patterns of millions, then deployed to predict and shape individual behavior. The pressure to conform—to optimize yourself according to metrics, to perform your identity for an audience, to become a data point in someone else's system—has never been more sophisticated or pervasive.
The fourth industrial revolution promised liberation through technology. Instead, it has created new forms of conformity, more subtle and more totalizing than anything the industrial age produced.
This is where existentialism becomes not merely relevant but essential.
The Quiet Resistance of Authenticity
Existentialism offers no easy solutions. It does not promise happiness or success. It does not provide a roadmap. What it offers instead is something more fundamental: the insistence that you are the author of your own life, and that this authorship cannot be outsourced, automated, or delegated.
To be authentic, in the existentialist sense, is not to "be yourself" in the Instagram sense—performing a curated version of selfhood for public consumption. It is to consciously choose your values, your commitments, your way of being in the world, knowing that you alone are responsible for those choices.
It means resisting the comfortable lie that you had no choice. It means acknowledging that when you scroll mindlessly through social media, when you adopt opinions without examination, when you pursue goals that are not truly yours—you are choosing. And you could choose differently.
This is uncomfortable. This is why existentialism has never been popular. It offers no comfort, no guarantee, no escape from the weight of freedom. But for those who feel the pressure of conformity pressing down, who sense that something essential is being lost in the rush toward optimization and efficiency, existentialism whispers: You are not a thing to be managed. You are a being to be lived.
The Philosophy for an Age of Anxiety
We live in an age of unprecedented anxiety. Depression and burnout are epidemic. Young people report feeling trapped by systems they did not create and cannot escape. The future feels predetermined—by climate change, by economic forces, by technological momentum.
But existentialism suggests a different way of thinking about this predicament. Yes, we are constrained by circumstances. Yes, we inherit a world not of our making. But within those constraints, we retain the fundamental freedom to choose how we respond, what we value, who we become.
This is not naive optimism. It is clear-eyed realism about the human condition. We cannot escape our situation. But we can refuse to be passively shaped by it. We can insist on our own agency, even in the face of forces far larger than ourselves.
A Lifeline in the Digital Age
As algorithms grow more sophisticated, as artificial intelligence becomes more integrated into every aspect of our lives, as the pressure to conform to data-driven ideals intensifies, the existentialist insistence on human freedom and responsibility becomes not a relic of 20th-century philosophy but a lifeline for the 21st century.
Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Sartre could not have imagined ChatGPT or TikTok or the metaverse. But they understood something fundamental about what it means to be human in a world that constantly threatens to reduce us to our functions, our metrics, our predictable patterns.
They understood that the deepest human need is not comfort or efficiency or optimization. It is authenticity. It is the freedom to choose who we become. It is the recognition that we are not things to be managed but beings to be lived.
In a world increasingly designed to make us predictable, controllable, and interchangeable, existentialism offers a quiet but radical resistance: You are not a data point. You are not a product. You are not predetermined. You are free. And that freedom is both your burden and your dignity.
About the Philosopher
The existentialist tradition has passed through many hands and many countries, but its core message remains unchanged: human existence is not fixed but fluid, not determined but chosen. In our age of artificial intelligence and algorithmic prediction, this message has never been more necessary.
