Existential Placebo

Sartre claims that one of the scariest things in life is our freedom. We are condemned to choose how to live our lives while not being able to see which choice will work out better for the future. Not only that, but we don’t even have an objective way of knowing what constitutes a “good choice.” This leads to a sort of “Unbearable Lightness of Being” where all our choices don’t matter because there is no way of differentiating between good and bad ones.

You might argue that, in fact, there are ways of knowing what constitutes a good or bad choice. For instance, you could talk to older people and mimic the actions of those whose lives you admire and who ended up satisfied. Or, you could subscribe to some sort of an idea of universal morality.

Another perhaps more comprehensive method is religion; it combines the idea of universal morality with an extra sense of meaningfulness, giving you not only advice for the now but also an end goal (telos) to strive towards.

You probably employ one or more of these methods (or something similar) for making decisions. You may think that because you use a method you aren’t subject to this sort of flailing-in-the-dark decision making. In reality, though, you are because you still have to choose which method will guide your decisions.

You may have grown up with one method and stayed with it even after finding others, but once you learned about the others you then made a passive choice not to follow them. And you still have no way to determine which method is best, or even what you mean by “the best.”

Some methods ultimately aim for happiness in this life; but is happiness really the ultimate goal of humanity? Others promise salvation for your eternal soul, but multiple methods offer paths for a soul’s salvation that are often mutually exclusive.

You can never know which method is ultimately the best choice since judging that would have required a prior method of decision making.