Existential Crisis: When You Can’t Stop Asking What the Point Is

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An existential crisis is when the big questions, what’s the point, who am I, what am I doing with the time I have, stop being philosophy and start keeping you awake. It isn’t a diagnosis or a mental illness. In my experience it’s the moment you notice that the life you’ve been performing isn’t backed by the person you actually are.

Maybe it started after a death, a birthday with a zero on the end, a job that ended. Maybe nothing happened at all. You’re standing in the kitchen and the whole arrangement, the commute, the inbox, the mortgage, suddenly looks like a play you don’t remember agreeing to be in.

For years one question haunted me in my moments alone. Why was I not Figs? I couldn’t break free of what I felt I had to contort myself into to fit in, to make money, to survive. And I knew it was the question I’d have to answer on my deathbed. Did the one who was born into this world actually get to live in it?

Even my reading was a performance. As a young man I dutifully struggled through David Foster Wallace’s thousand-page Infinite Jest, not because my body asked for it, but because a serious young man was supposed to have read it. I was performing my worth by the page.

What’s really going on

If something in you tightened at that line, that’s the part of you that believes you have to justify being here. It’s been working a very long shift.

Wallace told an old story about two young fish. An older fish swims past and says, “Morning, lads. How’s the water?” And one young fish turns to the other and says, “What’s water?” We’re the fish. The water is a culture where everything has to justify itself, produce something, scale. Some fish swim harder. Some stop swimming, sink to the bottom and say, what is the point. Some do both.

That’s what an existential crisis often is. You’ve stopped swimming long enough to taste the water. In that water, everything becomes a project. Rest becomes recovery so you can work. Even meaning becomes something to achieve. So of course the question “what’s the point?” lands like a threat. Everything you’ve built was built to answer it with output, and output can’t answer it.

In my book I call the opposite ecstatic living, and I don’t mean anything wild. I mean being, without a project attached. You’re not watching yourself have the experience and you’re not reaching for the next bit of stimulation. Your life is unfolding and you’re all the way inside it. It’s different from calm, and different from rest.

So you make sense. You aren’t broken for asking. What is the point of any of your success, your house, your savings, your title, if the one who was here first doesn’t get to inhabit your life? Imaginal psychology has a word for what that one is reaching for: entelechy, the fullness of the person you were born to become. The crisis is that one knocking.

Signs of an existential crisis, and what sets it off

The signs are consistent. You keep asking what the point is. You question your choices. You feel cut off even in a full room. Things that mattered feel hollow. You think about death more than you used to. You feel restless and flat at once.

The questions gather around four things: freedom and the weight of your choices, mortality, isolation, and meaning. The triggers are usually a loss or a threshold. A death, an illness, a job ending, a divorce, a decade birthday, the kids leaving. But it can come after good news too, a wedding or a new baby, because suddenly the life is real and the question of whether it’s yours gets louder. Sometimes there’s no trigger at all. It just builds.

The loop, on your situation

The practice I use is one I learned from Aftab Omer, reflexive participation: what am I noticing now, how am I affected, and what creative action is being called for? Run it on the last moment the question grabbed you.

Get ground in your body first

Feel your feet on the floor. Let one breath out, slower than the in-breath. You don’t have to solve the meaning of life in the next two minutes.

What happened

One moment, plainly. “I was at my desk, I looked at the calendar for next year, and I felt nothing.” Not your whole philosophy. Just that.

Where it lands in the body

A hollowness in the chest? A heaviness behind the eyes? The body is the first ledger, and it usually knew the life wasn’t fitting long before your mind admitted it. Stay with it for one breath. And now what do you notice?

Who’s driving

Name the part. The one demanding a five-year plan by midnight, or the one saying nothing matters, so why bother. One’s swimming harder, one’s sinking. Both are protectors, getting you out of a feeling they don’t trust you to survive.

Trace it

Only as far as today needs. When did you first learn that your worth had to be earned, or that being still was being lazy? You grew up in water that measures value through output. Of course the question of what you’re for feels like a test you’re failing.

Feel it and tell someone

Say the true sentence to one person who won’t rush to fix it. “I’m scared I’ve been living someone else’s life.” You’ll often find they’ve been asking the same thing in the dark.

One creative action

Do one thing this week for no reason at all. Not to improve, not to post, not to prove. Swim, dance in the kitchen, sit by water, make something nobody will see. Notice whether, for a moment, the question goes quiet. That quiet is an answer.

How to get through an existential crisis, honestly

Don’t burn your life down to find meaning. Keep the job, keep the people, and start changing what you do inside the life you have.

Build places where nothing needs to get better, and protect them fiercely. A walk, the ocean, a dance floor, a garden. Bar the doors and windows. Don’t narrate it, don’t turn it into content or a lesson. Without places like that, even healing becomes another task.

Stop asking what the meaning of life is and ask what the next true thing is. Meaning gets built, ground by ground, choice by choice.

And don’t wait. I used to think there’d be a moment where you graduate, where you’ve done enough work that you can’t blow up your own life anymore. There isn’t. I’ve seen people in their eighties blow up their marriages over work they never did inside themselves. It’s a privilege to grow old, and growing old makes this work harder, not easier. It will never be easier for you than it is right now. That isn’t a threat. It’s an invitation to start tonight.

One thing to do tonight

Find twenty minutes and one place where nothing needs to get better. Phone in another room. Sit on the step or lie on the floor, and notice what’s here: the light, the sounds, your breath. If the question comes, let it sit beside you unanswered. You’re practising being here without a project, which is what the crisis is asking for.

Would therapy help with this?

Coaching is how we go from where you are now to where you want to go, and we only address the past when it emerges in the present. If you’re asking big questions but still functioning, still feeling things, coaching is the right size.

But an existential crisis can slide into depression. If you can’t enjoy anything anymore, if you feel numb or like you’re just existing, if sleep and appetite have gone, or the question has turned into hopelessness, please talk to a licensed therapist where you live.

The path

What I’ve just walked you through is the Empathi Method. For an individual, it’s built on my Proof of Work of Being Human protocol: building sovereign ground inside yourself. On the Aliveness ground, that means having a moment this week where nothing needed to get better.

There are two ways to keep going. You can start now with Figlet, an AI coach that’s there at 2 in the morning, on the Aliveness ground. It’ll help you notice which part keeps turning your life into a project. Or you can get on the list for the book and the live program with me, where we do this work together.

What is the point of all this ground, if not to live ecstatically for some of the time you’re here? That’s the question that keeps me honest. Your crisis might be the first time in years you’ve let yourself ask it.

I go deeper into this in my book, Proof of Work (Greenleaf Book Group Press, February 2027).

Common questions

How long does an existential crisis last?

There’s no fixed timeline. For many people it’s weeks or months, returning in waves at life’s thresholds. It eases once something real starts growing: a practice, a relationship, a place where you feel alive.

What triggers an existential crisis?

Usually a loss or a threshold: a death, an illness, a job ending, a divorce, a big birthday, even a wedding or a new baby. Sometimes it simply builds until the questions are too loud to ignore.

Is an existential crisis the same as depression?

No, though they can overlap. An existential crisis is a crisis of meaning: you’re questioning your life but you can still feel. Depression often flattens feeling itself. If you can’t enjoy anything, feel hopeless, or can’t function, please talk to a licensed therapist where you live. If you’re thinking about hurting yourself, call or text 988.

Reflexive participation comes from the teaching of Aftab Omer at the Institute of Imaginal Studies, where I trained.