DE Weekly: Reflections, Thoughts, & Beliefs
Below is an archived email originally sent on August 25, 2025.
Reflections, Thoughts, & Beliefs
Hello, friends. This edition of the newsletter marks one year since I sent out the first one. It started as the first step in what I’ve always had a drive to do: to share my thoughts and my love for philosophy with people who appreciate it the same way I do. In the past year, it’s fulfilled all that and more.
Through Daily Existentialist Weekly, or DE Weekly for short, I’ve been able to cover not just existentialism, but all other kinds of philosophy and pop culture that ties into it.
I’ve written about the likely suspects––Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Søren Kierkegaard, Franz Kafka, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Edmund Husserl, and the like––but I’ve also been able to tie in some of my other favorites.
I’ve covered Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, and even present-day philosophers, too. It’s beneficial to do this because these different philosophies can help us understand existentialism on a deeper level.
My biggest takeaway from all 52 editions in the first year of this newsletter is there is a common thread holding together the entirety of philosophical thought.
From Western philosophy to Eastern, from religious thought to secular, from Ancient to medieval to contemporary to modern, this thread ties together all of the greatest philosophical literature and all that it explores.
I’ve tried to explain what these famous thinkers wrote and believed, but after enough time spent with their words one can’t help but come away with one’s own opinion of all this.
So, what are some things I’ve come to think about and believe since the first issue one year ago?
My contention is this: I believe that life does have meaning.
I suppose just saying that should disqualify me from being called an existentialist. It’s just as well; both Camus and Sartre rejected the term and refused to call themselves one, too.
But I would argue that choosing to explore the possibility that life does have inherent meaning is simply another aspect of existentialism that ought to be explored for us to call it a complete philosophy.
I think the existentialists of the twentieth century refusing to explore certain possibilities (such as life having inherent meaning) ultimately leaves existentialism incomplete.
They submitted to the “existential vacuum” of their generation’s collective neurosis and failed in completing the whole of existentialist thought.
All this to say…
I believe life has meaning. Life is excruciatingly meaningful; perhaps too meaningful.
Meaning exists, and like the representation of God and man in Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam, it is reaching out to us with all that it is, but we lazily raise our aim to it and refuse to meet it.
We run away from meaning because it terrifies us. We are terrified by the idea that there is a meaning out there we so want to live for that we would die for it too.
We can embrace the meaning of life if we choose. We have only to turn our face to it, to acknowledge and to welcome it.
There are those famous existential quandaries that have been committed to memory which many say have yet to be answered: Do I exist? Do I have Free Will? Does life have meaning?
I believe to answer these questions we need only live and act accordingly, in Good Faith.
Act as though you exist. Act as though you have Free Will. Act as though your life has meaning.
Kafka once wrote, “The meaning of life is that it stops.” I would add to this and say the meaning of life is that it happens. Having been, Viktor E. Frankl wrote, (that is, having lived), is a surer sign of having lived a meaningful existence than anything.
Life only has no meaning if you want that to be the meaning of life. Willful meaninglessness is spiritual nihilism that some do, in fact, choose to embrace. But you don’t have to.
Live as though your life has meaning, will yourself toward that meaning, and extend your arm finally to its outstretched hand.
“Man’s search for meaning is the primary motivation in his life and not a ‘secondary rationalization’ of instinctual drives. This meaning is unique and specific in that it must and can be fulfilled by him alone; only then does it achieve significance which will satisfy his own will to meaning.” ––Viktor E. Frankl
Thanks for reading.
Sincerely,
Brandon J. Seltenrich
P.S.––
However long you’ve been reading what I write, thank you for being a part of this. Onward to year two.
P.P.S.–
If there’s anything in particular you’d like to see me write about, fill out this form and let me know. And visit the DE Email Archives to catch up on the past year.
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