The Happy Existentialist

HAPPY EXISTENTIALIST: I have always maintained that what we have been teaching for almost 40 years is a happy, optimistic version of existentialism. The Option Process® might have great therapeutic and educational value, but it’s really about philosophy - teaching people how to think and utilize information effectively, especially if they want to live more self-affirming, self-trusting, and fulfilling lives. If I were to place the Option Philosophy within any philosophical category or tradition, I would call it a form of existentialism. Existentialists believe that there is no intrinsic meaning in the universe (no externally validated good or bad, right or wrong), and that people give situations and experience meaning in the way they choose to view them. In effect, people just make up meaning as they go along and have been doing that for eons. Different cultures, religions, and political and social systems abound, all with premises and standards that often differ dramatically from each other. For the existentialists, such an idea can be disconcerting and full of angst because they believe that nothing has meaning and there are no universally-agreed-upon rules and standards to live by! However, for us happy existentialists, the idea that we creatively make up what is meaningful is not distressing. Actually, it is perhaps one of the most hopeful ideas ever to be formulated.

If we make it all up by calling this good and this bad, this right and this wrong (and clearly we have been making it up in such a way as to cause much personal and interplanetary distress, unhappiness, fear, violence, war), then we have an opportunity (right now) to make it up differently. This time, for example, we could make it up happily, putting love, peace-of-mind, and tolerance into the mix, and removing judgments, prejudice and xenophobia. We could design our philosophy (remember, we’re just making it up “existentially”) and social systems to value diversity, individuality, and independent thinking. We could decide that no system of beliefs (social, political, or even religious) is the “right” system; otherwise other systems would have to be considered “wrong.” We could, in this way, respect and value our differences and perhaps, as a result, be more interested in learning about each other. Self-righteousness would wither away, since there would no longer be absolutes. No one would have the picture; we’d each have only a picture. No reason to fight about it any more. No reason to kill each other because we have different beliefs. Actually, we could encourage our diversity, rather than blind ourselves to it, sedate ourselves, or fight it. “Hey, here are the beliefs I made up that are important to me, and that I choose to live by. What beliefs did you make up?” We’d be much more curious, inquisitive, and unafraid. When I consider such a possibility, even if it seems for the moment outrageous, I feel not anguish, but relief and excitement. I now have an opportunity to be happy and live comfortably among others, and cease sowing the seeds of Armageddon (folks live who believe their beliefs are the right ones and yours the wrong ones). Hmmmm…we then could say that the happy existentialist purposely investigates how we think, feel, and behave in order first to understand and, then, to choose beliefs (individual and societal) that would help human happiness flourish.

Can we do it? It certainly seems worth the effort, even if we can’t guarantee an outcome for everyone. By formulating, reformulating, and further developing the Option Process® we have, we think, taken a step in that direction.

From the vantage point of what we see as possible, we’re still in kindergarten.