Existential crisis: when you ask yourself what it is all for

Tuesday morning, the car park outside work. The engine is off, the key still in the ignition. Everything is as it should be: the children are at school, the mortgage is being paid, the calendar is full of meetings. And yet you sit there, unable to open the door, because somewhere between the traffic lights and the barrier a question surfaced that is on no to-do list: “What is all this actually for?”

The question is not dramatic. It does not arrive with tears; more with a kind of quiet clarity, as if someone had switched off the sound for a moment. In ten minutes you will be at your desk answering emails. But something has shifted, and that something will come back in the evening, when the house is quiet.

People call this an existential crisis. The phrase sounds grand and slightly philosophical, yet it describes something very ordinary. In this post I would like to explain what is going on, how the psychiatrist Irvin Yalom described this state, how to tell it apart from depression, and what you can do with the question without having to solve it tonight.

What an existential crisis is, and is not

An existential crisis is not a diagnosis. You will not find it in any diagnostic manual, and nobody can “give” it to you. It is a name for a period in which questions about meaning, mortality, choice and belonging, which you normally carry somewhere in the background, step forward and no longer let you walk past them.

A crisis in the psychological sense is not a catastrophe but a point at which the old way is no longer enough and the new one has not yet arrived. In an existential crisis it is not the job or the marriage that fails; it is the answer. Whatever held the days together for so long (“I work for my family”, “once this is over it will be easier”, “that is just how life is”) suddenly no longer bears weight.

It also matters what the term does not mean. It does not mean you are spoilt, that you think too much, or that life is too good to you. The question of meaning is not a luxury of the well-fed. People ask it in all circumstances; it is only that when bare survival is at stake, urgency drowns it out.

Yalom’s four givens of existence

In 1980, in his book Existential Psychotherapy, the American psychiatrist Irvin Yalom described four facts that, in his view, every human being meets sooner or later, wherever and however they live. He called them the ultimate concerns, or givens, of existence. They are not an illness and not an error of thinking. They are the conditions under which we are here.

Death. We know we will die, and we know the people we love will die. Most of the time we keep that knowledge at a distance. When it comes close, it brings not only fear of the end but also an uncomfortable question: am I really living the time until then the way I would like to?

Freedom. It sounds like a gift, but Yalom describes it as a burden: if there is no plan written in advance for my life, I am responsible for it myself. Every choice means there are other possibilities I will not live. People who freeze before a big decision are often hesitating not because of the data but because of this weight; that is the subject of Decision paralysis: when thinking it over becomes a way of avoiding.

Isolation. Yalom does not mean having no company. He means the fact that you cannot let anyone all the way into your experience, and that each of us will go through certain things alone. The paradox is that people who can look at this fact are often capable of more closeness, because they do not demand that the other person erase it.

The question of meaning. Yalom, who is not religious himself, called the fourth given meaninglessness: the world does not come with instructions for use. A person of faith would describe the same place differently, as the question of whether they can trust a meaning that has been given to them. What the two share is that nobody can live the answer on your behalf.

Having meaning and searching for meaning are not the same

In 2006 the psychologist Michael Steger and colleagues put together a short questionnaire about meaning in life. It has ten statements, divided into two groups of five. The first measures how much meaning a person already feels in their life. The second measures how intensely they are searching for it. The most interesting finding was that these are not two ends of the same line. A person can have plenty of meaning and still be searching with curiosity; they can have little and not be searching; or they can have little and be searching with all their strength.

That third combination is the one we experience as a crisis. In Steger’s data, intense searching was on average associated with lower mood and more unpleasant emotions, while felt meaning was associated with greater satisfaction. Searching in itself is therefore not the problem. What hurts is searching with no ground beneath your feet.

It is also useful to know that the word meaning hides several things. In 2016 Frank Martela and Michael Steger proposed three: coherence (my life seems connected, I can make sense of it), purpose (I have a direction, something I am heading towards) and significance (the fact that I am alive matters). People in a crisis often say “nothing has any meaning”, but when they look more closely, one part is missing. One person has a direction but cannot feel that anything matters. Another knows they matter to their children but does not know where to go next. This is no small detail: the missing part tells you where to look.

When the question wakes up

It rarely comes out of nowhere. It is usually woken by an event that draws back the everyday curtain for a moment:

• The death of someone close, especially a parent. When the generation ahead of you dies, there is no longer anyone between you and the end; I write about this in The death of a parent in adulthood: the loss everyone underrates.
• An illness or a test result, yours or someone else’s, which shows that the body cannot be taken for granted.
• A goal achieved. A degree, a house, a promotion, the sale of a company. While you were climbing, the summit was the meaning. At the top it turns out that the path was.
• A round birthday or midlife, when for the first time you count backwards from the end; more in The midlife crisis is not a cliche: what is actually happening.
• The birth of a child, which along with joy brings an awareness of how fragile everything is.
• The loss of a framework that used to answer on your behalf: faith, a community, a profession, a marriage.

Two common versions have their own posts on the blog, and I will not repeat them here. If the question opened up around work that feels empty, read Work without meaning: what psychology knows about why we need it. If it opened up when the work ran out, read Retirement, the loss of a role and the question of meaning.

Existential crisis or depression

This is a distinction worth being precise about, because the two states can look the same from outside while needing different help. The sentence “nothing has any meaning” can be a sincere philosophical question. It can also be a sign of depression dressed up as philosophy.

The American diagnostic manual DSM-5 requires, for a depressive episode, at least five of nine symptoms lasting at least two weeks, among them depressed mood or a loss of interest and pleasure. The rest are very physical: changes in sleep, appetite and weight, fatigue, slowing down or restlessness, difficulty concentrating, feelings of worthlessness and excessive guilt, thoughts of death. Depression is a state of the whole organism, not an opinion about the world.

The rough difference is whether the question is still alive. In an existential crisis the question stirs a person: they read, talk, write at night, get angry. The taste of food, music and a child’s laughter still reach them; it is just that a question mark stands beside it all. In depression the question is usually no longer a question but a conclusion: “Nothing has any meaning and it never did.” Behind it is not curiosity but exhaustion. I write in more detail about the difference between a mood and an illness in Depression is not sadness: how to tell them apart and why it matters.

The two states are not mutually exclusive. A long, lonely existential crisis can slide into depression, and depression often opens existential questions. So a simple rule applies: if, alongside the questions, the body has changed too (sleep, appetite, energy) and this has lasted more than two weeks, see your GP first. Sometimes there are purely physical causes behind it, which a basic check-up will show.

And if the question “what is it all for” turns into the thought that it would be better if you were not here, that is no longer philosophy. In Slovenia, call the mental health crisis line Klic v duševni stiski on 01 520 99 00 (every day from 7 pm to 7 am) or the Samarijan helpline on 116 123 (24 hours a day), and in an emergency 112.

Faith, no faith, and the same question

I would like to be careful in both directions here. Religious traditions have spent centuries shaping answers to exactly these four givens: what comes after death, what we are free for, who is with us when we are alone, and what it is all for. For many people those answers provide firm ground and a community that shares them. That is not an escape from the question but one of the ways of living it.

It is equally true that people without faith live full, meaningful lives in which meaning grows out of relationships, work, nature, creating, or caring for others. That is not a deficient version of something else either; it is a complete answer.

An existential crisis does not pick sides. A believer may experience it as doubt, or as the sense that prayer is met with silence. A non-believer may experience it as a sudden emptiness where they thought nothing was missing. It is especially hard when the framework collapses: that is the subject of Losing your faith, or the community that used to hold you. Whether and how you can bring faith or doubt into the therapy room is covered in Faith and therapy: can I talk to my therapist about God?. A therapist’s task is not to offer you their answer but to help you hear your own.

When you say the question out loud

Most people carry this question alone for a long time, afraid it will sound ungrateful or overblown. A conversation between two people who have been together for twenty years might sound something like this (composed, not a real person):

“Are you all right? You’ve seemed far away lately.”
“I don’t know. Everything’s fine. I just keep wondering what it’s all for.”
“What do you mean? Am I not enough for you? Are we not enough?”
“It’s not about you. When Dad died, I thought: so this is it. A job, a house, and then the end.”
“… You never told me that.”
“I didn’t know how.”

Something typical happens in this short exchange. The partner first hears the question as a verdict on the relationship, which is understandable but mistaken. An existential question is almost never the message “you are not enough for me”. It is the message “I have met something you cannot help me with by fixing it”. What you can do is stay close.

Here Yalom’s third given shows an unusual side. The loneliness this question brings cannot be taken away by another person. But they can sit beside it. The difference between these two kinds of aloneness is also described under loneliness in the knowledge base.

What helps and what does not

Thinking in circles does not help. The question of meaning cannot be answered the way you solve an equation. Anyone who tries to settle it at night, alone and by thought alone, usually ends up brooding in a loop with no exit; why that happens is described in Rumination: the scientific name for spinning thoughts — and why the brain does it at all.

Making the question smaller helps. Viktor Frankl, the Viennese psychiatrist who survived the concentration camps and wrote about it in Man’s Search for Meaning, argued that we do not find meaning by asking “what is the meaning of life” but by asking what life expects of me today. He described three routes: doing or creating something, truly experiencing something or someone, and taking a stance towards suffering that cannot be avoided. None of them requires a grand answer.

Looking at the traces you leave helps. In his book on the fear of death, Yalom describes rippling: each of us, often without knowing it, sends out circles of influence that travel on through other people for a long time. How you taught someone to ride a bike, how you listened to someone, the word you said at the right moment. This is not consolation in place of an answer, but it is a counterweight to the feeling that nothing counts.

Talking helps. In a 2015 meta-analysis, Joël Vos and colleagues reviewed therapies that work explicitly with existential questions. Those focused on meaning did best: afterwards people reported more meaning and less psychological distress. The studies are relatively few and of varying quality, so this is a promising result rather than a final one.

I am not an existential therapist myself. As a therapist in training under supervision in marriage and family therapy, I am training in relational family therapy and work in person in Ljubljana, also with English-speaking clients. From that angle, what often emerges around the question of meaning is a family story: what your parents and grandparents lived for, what was never talked about at home, how dying and grieving were done in your family. The attitude to meaning is inherited too. The longer genogram session A Look into the Past is designed for this.

An exercise: four questions on one sheet

This exercise does not answer “what is it all for”. It does something more modest: it divides a foggy weight into parts so that you can see which one is pressing hardest right now. You need a sheet of paper and twenty minutes.

1. Divide the sheet into four boxes and label them: mortality, choice, aloneness, meaning.
2. In each box write one sentence that is true for you right now. For example: “I am afraid I will die without having changed anything.” “I do not know whether I chose this life or it happened to me.” Do not correct or polish.
3. Circle the box your body reacts to most. Tightness in the chest, a lump in the throat, restless legs. That is the part that is loudest now; the others can wait.
4. Beside the circled box write one small step for this week. Not an answer, a step. For mortality, perhaps a call you keep putting off. For choice, one decision you make deliberately. For aloneness, one conversation in which you say a little more than usual. For meaning, an hour for something that once mattered to you.
5. Show the sheet to one person, or at least keep it and look in a month to see whether the same box is still the loud one.

If at the fourth step you find it hard to work out what matters to you at all, the personal values list can help.

When this is not an existential crisis

The term is attractive because it lends dignity to distress. That is exactly why it sometimes needs to be put down.

When it is depression or a physical illness. I wrote about this above. Talking about meaning does not treat depression; it can even deepen it if a person concludes that they are at fault for not finding the answer.

When the problem is very concrete. Sometimes “nothing has any meaning” means “I am in a job where I am humiliated”, “we have not talked in our marriage for years” or “I have not slept a whole night in three years”. Then the big question hides a smaller one that could actually be answered. Before you look for the meaning of life, check whether what you need is rest, a boundary or a change.

When it is grief. After a loss the world often loses its colour and its meaning. That is part of grieving, not a separate crisis, and what it needs above all is time and people.

When there is no question. Many people live well without ever explicitly asking about meaning. That is not shallowness. Meaning can be lived without being spoken, and nobody has to go through a crisis for their life to be worthwhile.

And finally: the crisis does not have to be “solved”. The four givens remain. What changes is that you can look at them without the ground giving way. For many people that is all they were looking for.

What to remember

• An existential crisis is not a diagnosis but a period in which questions about death, freedom, isolation and meaning step to the front.
• Having meaning and searching for meaning are two different things; what hurts most is searching with no ground beneath your feet.
• What separates it from depression is that the question is still alive and the body mostly functions. If sleep and energy have changed, see a doctor; with thoughts of death, call straight away.
• Faith and no faith are equally valid frameworks; a crisis can strike in either, and ground can be found in both.
• A big question is rarely answered by thinking. More often by a small step, a trace you leave, and a person who stays close.