DE Weekly: Bad Faith, Sartre’s Waiter, & Who Are We?
Below is an archived email originally sent on August 31, 2026.
Bad Faith, Sartre’s Waiter, & Who Are We?
I have mentioned Jean-Paul Sartre's idea of mauvaise foi––“bad faith”––in countless newsletters over the years, as it is a crucial concept to understand when discussing such Existentialist ideas as the burden of choice, authenticity, and radical freedom. But, what does bad faith actually look like in action? And, what are its consequences?
Sartre defines bad faith as a self-deception whereby we either convince ourselves or allow ourselves to be convinced that we lack the freedom necessary to escape the anxiety of being through exercising our personal responsibility to do so.
As humans, we naturally possess a “radical freedom.” This freedom is so total that it allows us to define ourselves over the course of our lives, which, as Sartre admits, causes a significant amount of anxiety. It is, after all, a lot of responsibility.
Sometimes (perhaps to cope with this responsibility and shirk some of it along the way), we lie to ourselves and pretend that we are trapped by external forces reducing us to something we are not.
At the end of the day, living in this mode might bring us to ask ourselves, “Who am I? Who am I really? And, what does it mean to be an authentic human being? Am I one?”
A famous example Sartre uses in his 1943 magnum opus Being and Nothingness is that of a waiter at a café.
He describes a waiter who is playing at being a waiter, rather than a human who happens to be waiting tables at that time. This waiter’s movements are just a bit too precise, a bit too waiter-like. In other words, this waiter is a bit too good at being a waiter. Thus, he must be deceiving himself in bad faith that he is only a waiter.
“Let us consider the waiter in the café,” writes Sartre. “His movement is quick and forward, a little too precise, a little too rapid. He comes towards the customers with a step a little too quick. He bends forward a little too eagerly; his voice, his eyes express an interest a little too solicitous for the order of the client… All his behaviour seems to us a game.
“He applies himself to linking his movements as if they were mechanisms, the one regulating the other; his gestures and even his voice seem to be mechanisms; he gives himself the quickness and pitiless rapidity of things. He is playing, he is amusing himself. But what is he playing? We need not watch long before we can explain it: he is playing at being a waiter in a café.” (Sartre, Being and Nothingness, p. 101)
Hold the phone, some of us might say. Is not this waiter simply trying to be good at his job? I mean, isn’t it a pleasant experience when we encounter someone in public who tries their hardest to make our day a little easier, a little better?
For Sartre, a frequent visitor of Parisian cafés in his day, this thought seems not to have occurred.
Sartre instead looked beneath the job duties of the waiter and saw not someone being good at their job, but someone guilty of thinking that a waiter is all that he is.
Say you were to meet that particular waiter off duty and ask him, “What are you?” He might reply, “I am a waiter.” Therein, for Sartre, lies the bad faith.
When we lie and pretend that we are nothing more than what we are in an instant in time, nothing more than what our occupation is on any given day, we are denying our freedom to be anything but that.
We are confusing our various roles with reality: I am not just a writer, I am a human. You are not just a reader, you are a human. A waiter is not just a waiter, a waiter is a human. To hide beneath labels and roles of any kind is to hide from the anxiety that life thrusts on us––to relinquish our radical freedom.
When I was reading through my notes for this newsletter and revisiting the story of Sartre’s waiter, I had a thought. I examined the question that popped into my head, which was: is bad faith always necessarily bad?
When all of us clock into work, whether we realize it or not, we, too, are “playing a role.” We might not act the same in front of our coworkers as we do with our spouse, or with our family or our friends.
We might avoid talking about certain topics we are passionate about. We might adopt a different tone of voice with our clients from 9:00am–5:00pm than the one we use outside of work. For some of us, maybe we don’t actually do much outside of work. Maybe we are a waiter. And a damn good one, at that.
Is that so bad? Is that bad faith?
The answer I would proffer to that question (indeed, I think Sartre would concur) is that it is only bad faith if you don’t mean it.
If you are a waiter at a café, you probably repeat a lot of the same things to scores of people per day: What can I get for you? Would you like cream, sugar? Anything else? How is everything tasting? Ready for the check?
But do you mean it? Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe it is just a job position––maybe you are not playing at being a waiter at all; maybe you recognize you are a human who has a job as a waiter sometimes.
You see, it’s not that being a waiter is a bad thing. In fact, no job you might have at any point is really a bad thing. The aspect of it that Sartre was getting at is that we must be careful not to spend the entirety of our lives acting out a role that fixes our perception of ourselves to any one thing.
To do this would lead to suffering. Suffering––suffering at the anxiety that we have closed off any other possibilities of growth and becoming to ourselves by our own accord.
Suffering––suffering that we have attached ourselves to a fixed identity that limits our freedom, denies our existential potential, and pigeonholes us into a narrow existence and essence of bad faith.
It is as Martin Heidegger said before Sartre: our lives embody a wider context of a society we exist in, and we sometimes must do things to forge a life for ourselves and our families. But how we spend our lives is important. We cannot give in to self-imposed constraints that deny our own freedom: this is where bad faith arises.
As humans, we are self-making beings. We are being-for-themselves: we exist for our Self, and live for our Self. We cannot deny our humanity.
Thanks for reading.
Sincerely,
Brandon J. Seltenrich
P.S.––
Here begins year three of the newsletter…
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