(Part 2) Best products from r/Existentialism

Link to Cal Newport's latest book: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Good-They-Cant-Ignore-You/dp/1455509124. Also, his blog "Study Hacks" is pretty good.

The Nietzsche Reader and The Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche are both great resources to dive into!

https://www.amazon.com/Jay-JA0027-Gift-of-Nothing/dp/B019HDSCPU

Amazon has you covered with free shipping!

Existentialism vs Marxism has an entire breakdown. It's a great book.

Sam Harris comes to mind, as well as plenty of other prominent writers on the topic of Determinism. https://www.amazon.com/Free-Will-Sam-Harris-ebook/dp/B006IDG2T6/

I think the core of your crisis stems from a misunderstanding of key philosophical ideas.

For example:

>you can remove everything existent and still be left with that something that you removed everything from.

You're misunderstanding the concept of "nothingness" throughout your entire post. I suggest reading The Problem of Existence by Arthur Witherall and Being and Nothingness by Jean-Paul Sartre. They will give you a better understanding of both the metaphysical and phenomenological implications of "nothingness."

Also, I let this post stay up because you seem to have included many ideas related to existentialism, but any future support you may need that is existential in nature should be sought in /r/ExistentialSupport, our sister sub dedicated to existential crises. Discussions there are much less structured and don't have to be directly related to existentialism.

I mean this seriously, but i'd look into working with a good physician or psychiatrist (i.e., one who doesn't just randomly throw antidepressants at you), because there's a good chance that a bad underlying physiology is at least partly influencing these dark thoughts. There are even plenty of supplemental routes to take, depending on the type of depression you're experiencing; so if you primarily experience lack of pleasure and motivation, this means low dopamine, and tyrosine is an amino acid supplement you can take which precedes dopamine and so turns into it; same thing with tryptophan and 5-HTP for low serotonin (which presents primarily as rumination, "too many thoughts in my head"), and norepinephrine (consider copper or vitamin C deficiencies, both supplements which are cofactors -- speed up -- the enzyme that converts dopamine to norepinephrine).

Also talk therapy could help unhinge any possible underlying schemas or core beliefs that could be contributing to your depression. Check out this link, for example (disregarding the first few pages which speak of personality disorders), or this book.

Totally serious here. We are also biological creatures in addition to being conscious ones.

this is the first book I picked up. I liked that it read like a college class, although the highly intellectual style of writing made it a more difficult read. but it explored and compared many different basics of existentialism and helped me define terms i wasn't comfortable with.

Have you read this: https://www.amazon.com/Being-Black-Living-Fearlessness-Compass/dp/0140196307

I read it in high school. It was about the first thing I ever read on existentialism. Also, I think it has content of value for all races, but it's a perspective that may be under explored.

They were divided; Kierkegaard has always been a controversial figure.

You might want to check out Encounters with Kierkegaard: A Life as Seen by His Contemporaries, ed. Kirmmse, as well as this volume.

It's from a collection of his essays called Escape to Hell.

"Man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world—and defines himself afterwards"

—Jean-Paul Sartre

From Existentialism and Humanism (later published in English as Existentialism is a Humanism)

Whatever you do, do NOT read existentialist books.

All that will do is reinforce and rationalize your own depressed thinking. Existentialism is rationalized depression.

Try something with actually proven CBT psychological theory. Like "Overcoming Depression" by Paul Gilbert.

Or if you want something a bit more philosophical, try "The Denial of Death." In a way, it also is existentialist and reinforces the depressive premise, but it also describes the way out, through transcending the individual self. That book is what turned me from a depressive libertarian to a happy ethnonationalist.

Ideas, morals, truth statements, and "the right way to live" are all concepts, too. As are the (so called) stages of development. These concepts will vary from culture to culture and time and to time.

I might argue that few people are "okay living in this world of uncertainty" which is why there are so many ways to solve the problems of existence. Consider how nearly 50% of Americans take antidepressants.

What you seem to be groping at is a RIGHT meaning. This is the problem of meaning for you (or plague, as you might have it). What if you were to let go of the RIGHT part of that, and just focus on meaning. Everyone finds themselves within a structure of meaning that organizes their existence. This is cultural, temporal, social, embodied, and so forth.

I will soon have an existential developmental psychology book that looks at the various problems that mark growing up (at least in the West). But Richard Knowles has something like this from the year I was born: https://www.amazon.com/Human-Development-Possibility-Erikson-Heidegger/dp/0819149934

Gary Cox. How to Be an Existentialist. or How to Get Real, Get a Grip and Stop Making Excuses.

It's short and well written with humor and lightness. Sartre is the focus. He's an expert on Sartre. It covers the basic concepts from Sartre's Being and Time along with a little Heidegger, Nietzsche, De Beauvoir and others; with many real world examples. He says that people can be existentialist while believing in god. The God issue is not addressed in any detail.

>Gary Cox has a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Birmingham, UK, where he is also an Honorary Research Fellow. He is author of The Sartre Dictionary, Sartre and Fiction, Sartre: A Guide for the Perplexed, How to Be an Existentialist, The Existentialist's Guide, How to Be a Philosopher, The God Confusion, Deep Thought and a biography of Sartre, Existentialism and Excess– all published by Bloomsbury.


His other popular book on this subject is also good, but it's slightly bigger and denser because it is a "guide" to everything in life with chapters on marriage, children, sex, death and god etc. It covers everything in the first book, but that material is condensed and then it moves on to various subjects. The subtitle is "To Death, the Universe, and Nothingness" so... It's a little darker in tone. That might be alienating to some.

Gary Cox. The Existentialist's Guide.