Start Making Sense summary

If someone were to walk up to you on the street today and ask “who are you?” your answer would largely depend on where in the world you grew up. If you were born in East Asia, for instance, you might immediately start talking about your family or your community. Born in Western Europe or North America, and you are more likely to answer with information about your career, your hobbies or interests.

Whether individualistic, like the latter, or more familial, like the former, humans understand who they are based on their frames of reference — frameworks which are communicated through family, religion, education, and culture from infancy onwards. As social creatures, humans have an innate need to communicate and socialize with others because our understanding of ourselves is relational. That is, we understand who we are only in relation to others.

But in an age when many old social and family structures are breaking down, from the decline in religious observation to the algorithmic fragmentations of social media, making sense of oneself in relation to an increasingly complex and tumultuous world is more difficult than ever before. This matters deeply. 

Because as modern cognitive science has confirmed, one of the most important indicators of happiness across history and cultures is whether or not you are leading a meaningful life. But “what makes something meaningful?” is a question that has haunted thinkers since Nietzsche first declared “god is dead” in 1882 inThe Gay Science. Thinkers who had witnessed the breakdown of modern politics into global warfare — twice — by the middle of the last century found little refuge in the comforts of either religion or rationality. Both had led to some pretty horrific ends.

Poet W. H. Auden wrote a lengthy poem about it in 1947, called The Age of Anxiety, which poured out the disillusionment, fear, and uncertainty of living through a collapse of social meaning. Many feel deep resonance with his words today, finding in the current moment of climate crisis, authoritarianism, and increasing inequality a powerful echo of Auden’s time. For your life to make sense to you, you must find a way to make meaning of it, even in an age of anxiety. 

That’s where a variety of strategies of the Existentialists come in, from understanding the power of the stories you tell yourself, to why it is so difficult to change your frame of reference even when it is negatively affecting you. They took on some of the thorniest issues of how and why humans do the things we do, and the stories we tell ourselves to justify it.