“Man,” Sartre said, “is nothing else but what he purposes, he exists only in so far as he realises himself, he is therefore nothing else but the sum of his actions, nothing else but what his life is.” The byproduct of this, of life’s inherent meaninglessness, is an inherent freedom: the freedom to choose who we are, how we live, and what matters to us. And here we experience the next rung of our existential problem: the anxiety or anguish of choice.
