Sartre's Existentialism Is a Humanism › Why This Matters Now

Sartre's existentialism speaks to our contemporary moment with surprising relevance, though applying his ideas requires care and nuance. Consider the workplace. How often do we hear, or say, "I have to do this job," "I have no choice but to follow these policies," "The system requires it"? Sartre would recognize these as expressions of bad faith. You chose this job. You choose to stay. You choose to follow the policies rather than resist or leave. This is not to say that the choice is easy or that the alternatives are attractive. The constraints are real, and for many people the costs of leaving are severe. But acknowledging that a choice exists, however constrained, is different from pretending no choice exists at all. This recognition can be liberating. If you are not trapped by necessity, then change is possible. The organization that treats its employees badly is not a force of nature but a collection of human choices that could be made differently. The career that feels like a prison is a path you are walking and could, in principle, leave. Recognizing freedom is the precondition of meaningful action, even when action is difficult. Consider relationships. How often do we treat our partners, friends, or family members as if they had fixed natures that explained and excused their behavior? "He's just not the romantic type." "She's always been anxious." Sartre reminds us that people are not things with fixed properties. They are ongoing projects, capable of change, responsible for who they become. To treat someone as having a fixed nature is to deny their humanity, and to deny your own responsibility for how you respond to them. This does not mean ignoring real patterns or pretending that change is easy. It means holding open the possibility of change while being honest about its difficulty. Consider technology and artificial intelligence. As we build systems that make decisions about loans, hiring, criminal sentencing, and content moderation, we face a version of the bad faith Sartre diagnosed. "The algorithm decided." "The data showed." "The model predicted." But algorithms are designed by humans, trained on data humans collected, deployed in contexts humans chose. The responsibility cannot be transferred to the machine. Every technological system embodies human choices and values, and we remain responsible for those choices. This does not mean AI systems are mere tools with no independent effects; their complexity can obscure responsibility and create new challenges for accountability. But obscured responsibility is not absent responsibility. Consider social media and identity. Platforms encourage us to construct and perform fixed identities: personal brands, curated selves, tribal affiliations. Sartre would see this as an elaborate mechanism for bad faith, a way of pretending that we are what our profile says we are rather than ongoing projects of self-creation. The authentic response is not necessarily to abandon social media but to use it with awareness: this is a performance I am choosing, not a revelation of my fixed nature. Consider mental health. Contemporary psychology has taught us much about the biological and environmental factors that shape our behavior. There is a tension here with Sartre's emphasis on freedom. Research on genetics, trauma, and neurochemistry suggests that our choices are more constrained than Sartre sometimes implies. Yet there is also a danger in using this knowledge to deny agency entirely: "I can't help it, I have anxiety," "My trauma made me do it." Perhaps the truth lies in a both/and: we are shaped by our circumstances, and we retain some degree of responsibility for how we respond to them. The person with anxiety chooses, within limits, how to relate to their anxiety. The person with trauma chooses, within limits, what meaning to make of it. This is not victim-blaming. It is the recognition that human dignity requires some measure of agency, and agency requires some measure of responsibility. The exact boundaries remain genuinely contested.