Existential crisis
Existential crises are inner conflicts characterized by the impression that life lacks meaning and by confusion about one's personal identity. They are accompanied by anxiety and stress, often to such a degree that they disturb one's normal functioning in everyday life and lead to depression. Their negative attitude towards meaning reflects characteristics of the philosophical movement of existentialism. The components of existential crises can be divided into emotional, cognitive, and behavioral aspects. Emotional components refer to the feelings, such as emotional pain, despair, helplessness, guilt, anxiety, or loneliness. Cognitive components encompass the problem of meaninglessness, the loss of personal values or spiritual faith, and thinking about death. Behavioral components include addictions, and anti-social and compulsive behavior.
Existential crises may occur at different stages in life: the teenage crisis, the quarter-life crisis, the mid-life crisis, and the later-life crisis. Earlier crises tend to be forward-looking: the individual is anxious and confused about which path in life to follow regarding education, career, personal identity, and social relationships. Later crises tend to be backward-looking. Often triggered by the impression that one is past one's peak in life, they are usually characterized by guilt, regret, and a fear of death. If an earlier existential crisis was properly resolved, it is easier for the individual to resolve or avoid later crises. Not everyone experiences existential crises in their life.
The problem of meaninglessness plays a central role in all of these types. It can arise in the form of cosmic meaning, which is concerned with the meaning of life at large or why we are here. Another form concerns personal secular meaning, in which the individual tries to discover purpose and value mainly for their own life. Finding a source of meaning may resolve a crisis, like altruism, dedicating oneself to a religious or political cause, or finding a way to develop one's potential. Other approaches include adopting a new system of meaning, learning to accept meaninglessness, cognitive behavioral therapy, and the practice of social perspective-taking.
Negative consequences of existential crisis include anxiety and bad relationships on the personal level as well as a high divorce rate and decreased productivity on the social level. Some questionnaires, such as the Purpose in Life Test, measure whether someone is currently undergoing an existential crisis. Outside its main use in psychology and psychotherapy, the term "existential crisis" refers to a threat to the existence of something.
Definition
In psychology and psychotherapy, the term "existential crisis" refers to a form of inner conflict. It is characterized by the impression that life lacks meaning and is accompanied by various negative experiences, such as stress, anxiety, despair, and depression. This often happens to such a degree that it disturbs one's normal functioning in everyday life. The inner nature of this conflict sets existential crises apart from other types of crises that are mainly due to outward circumstances, like social or financial crises. Outward circumstances may still play a role in triggering or exacerbating an existential crisis, but the core conflict happens on an inner level. The most common approach to resolving an existential crisis consists in addressing this inner conflict and finding new sources of meaning in life.The core issue responsible for the inner conflict is the impression that the individual's desire to lead a meaningful life is thwarted by an apparent lack of meaning, also because they feel much confusion about what meaning really is, and are constantly questioning themselves. In this sense, existential crises are crises of meaning. This is often understood through the lens of the philosophical movement known as existentialism. One important aspect of many forms of existentialism is that the individual seeks to live in a meaningful way but finds themselves in a meaningless and indifferent world. The exact term "existential crisis" is not commonly found in the traditional existentialist literature in philosophy. But various closely related technical terms are discussed, such as existential dread, existential vacuum, existential despair, existential neurosis, existential sickness, anxiety, and alienation.
Different authors focus in their definitions of existential crisis on different aspects. Some argue that existential crises are at their core crises of identity. On this view, they arise from a confusion about the question "Who am I?" and their goal is to achieve some form of clarity about oneself and one's position in the world. As identity crises, they involve intensive self-analysis, often in the form of exploring different ways of looking at oneself. They constitute a personal confrontation with certain key aspects of the human condition, like existence, death, freedom, and responsibility. In this sense, the person questions the very foundations of their life. Others emphasize the confrontation with human limitations, such as death and lack of control. Some stress the spiritual nature of existential crises by pointing out how outwardly successful people may still be severely affected by them if they lack the corresponding spiritual development.
The term "existential crisis" is most commonly used in the context of psychology and psychotherapy. But it can also be employed in a more literal sense as a crisis of existence to express that the existence of something is threatened. In this sense, a country, a company, or a social institution faces an existential crisis if political tensions, military threats, high debt, or social changes may have as a result that the corresponding entity ceases to exist.
Components
Existential crises are usually seen as complex phenomena that can be understood as consisting of various components. Some approaches distinguish three types of components belonging to the fields of emotion, cognition, and behavior. Emotional aspects correspond to what it feels like to have an existential crisis. It is usually associated with emotional pain, despair, helplessness, guilt, anxiety, and loneliness. On the cognitive side, the affected are often confronted with a loss of meaning and purpose together with the realization of one's own end. Behaviorally, existential crises may express themselves in addictions and anti-social behavior, sometimes paired with ritualistic behavior, loss of relationships, and degradation of one's health. While manifestations of these three components can usually be identified in every case of an existential crisis, there are often significant differences in how they manifest. Nonetheless, it has been suggested that these components can be used to give a more unified definition of existential crises.Emotional
On the emotional level, existential crises are associated with unpleasant experiences, such as fear, anxiety, panic, and despair. They can be categorized as a form of emotional pain whereby people lose trust and hope. This pain often manifests in the form of despair and helplessness. The despair may be caused by being unable to find meaning in life, which is associated both with a lack of motivation and the absence of inner joy. The impression of helplessness arises from being unable to find a practical response to deal with the crisis and the associated despair. This helplessness concerns specifically a form of emotional vulnerability: the individual is not just subject to a wide range of negative emotions, but these emotions often seem to be outside the person's control. This feeling of vulnerability and lack of control can itself produce further negative impressions and may lead to a form of panic or a state of deep mourning.But on the other hand, there is also often an impression in the affected that they are in some sense responsible for their predicament. This is the case, for example, if the loss of meaning is associated with bad choices in the past for which the individual feels guilty. But it can also take the form of a more abstract type of bad conscience as existential guilt. In this case, the agent carries a vague sense of guilt that is free-floating in the sense that it is not tied to any specific wrongdoing by the agent. Especially in existential crises in the later parts of one's life, this guilt is often accompanied by a fear of death. But just as in the case of guilt, this fear may also take a more abstract form as an unspecific anxiety associated with a sense of deficiency and meaninglessness.
As crises of identity, existential crises often lead to a disturbed sense of personal integrity. This can be provoked by the apparent meaninglessness of one's life together with a general lack of motivation. Central to the sense of personal integrity are close relationships with oneself, others, and the world. The absence of meaning usually has a negative impact on these relationships. As a lack of a clear purpose, it threatens one's personal integrity and can lead to insecurity, alienation, and self-abandonment. The negative impact on one's relationships with others is often experienced as a form of loneliness.
Depending on the person and the crisis they are suffering, some of these emotional aspects may be more or less pronounced. While they are all experienced as unpleasant, they often carry within them various positive potentials as well that can push the person in the direction of positive personal development. Through the experience of loneliness, for example, the person may achieve a better understanding of the substance and importance of relationships.
Cognitive
The main cognitive aspect of existential crises is the loss of meaning and purpose. In this context, the term "meaninglessness" refers to the general impression that there is no higher significance, direction, or purpose in our actions or in the world at large. It is associated with the question of why one is doing what one is doing and why one should continue. It is a central topic in existentialist psychotherapy, which has as one of its main goals to help the patient find a proper response to this meaninglessness. In Viktor Frankl's logotherapy, for example, the term existential vacuum is used to describe this state of mind. Many forms of existentialist psychotherapy aim to resolve existential crises by assisting the patient in rediscovering meaning in their life. Closely related to meaninglessness is the loss of personal values. This means that things that seemed valuable to the individual before, like the relation to a specific person or success in their career, may now appear insignificant or pointless to them. If the crisis is resolved, it can lead to the discovery of new values.Another aspect of the cognitive component of many existential crises concerns the attitude to one's personal end, i.e. the realization that one will die one day. While this is not new information as an abstract insight, it takes on a more personal and concrete nature when one sees oneself confronted with this fact as a concrete reality one has to face. This aspect is of particular relevance for existential crises occurring later in life or when the crisis was triggered by the loss of a loved one or by the onset of a terminal disease. For many, the issue of their own death is associated with anxiety. But it has also been argued that the contemplation of one's death may act as a key to resolving an existential crisis. The reason for this is that the realization that one's time is limited can act as a source of meaning by making the remaining time more valuable and by making it easier to discern the bigger issues that matter in contrast to smaller everyday issues that can act as distractions. Important factors for dealing with imminent death include one's religious outlook, one's self-esteem, and social integration as well as one's future prospects.