Are You Afraid? - Existentialism

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Are You Afraid? -Existentialism “This is a snakeskin jacket! And for me it's a symbol of my individuality, and my belief... in personal freedom.” (Sailor, in David Lynch’s ‘Wild at Heart”) So here I am running around in my writing studio in a beret, smoking Gauloise and spouting existentialism à la Simone de Beauvoir. I watched Suckerpunch with the sub-adults last night so I’m actually only smoking Gauloise in my virtual reality writing for my blog princesssnapperhead.com. If you believe that reality exists independent of consciousness that what is just is, and therefore that we exist as individuals, as acting and responsible conscious beings then you embrace one of the basic tenets of Existentialism. I’ve spent many discussions over a steaming cup of coffee with my friend Samantha Fifield discussing the question of being and what it means to be an individual, to exist in this world as an individual and how other people perceive us as individuals. Sam decries the labels, roles, stereotypes, definitions, that other people want to give us based on what we do for ‘work’. Sick of being asked at parties ‘What do you do?’ as a social identifier that would neatly put her in a ‘box’ and form the basis for assumptions about her ‘self’, Sam conducted an interesting social experiment. She started to reply ‘Nothing. I do nothing at all’. There would be a shocked silence and the people she was talking with would slowly find an excuse to drift off. There was no box to classify her with and I would argue they were then faced with an existential crisis where they are forced to question their reason for being. For most people this is too uncomfortable. As a university graduate with a degree in accounting but not working in that area at the moment, she felt that people often evaluated her worth by her ‘work’. Of course this is the age old problem for women who choose to ‘stay

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