I've only recently started to read and use philosophy in my everyday life, but the formulation of philosophical ideas and how to use them has firmly implanted itself in my psyche. After reading Frankl, I see the benefit of existentialism. Essentially, people can withstand any hardship with a strong enough why. I've also read Carl Sagan, and his large toolkit for how to not let people trick you with fantastic claims. The two authors espouse ideas that don't work with one another. You can't both agree that things happen for a purpose (Teleological Causation) and that things don't happen for a purpose, so you must look for the real cause or reason that a thing happened when a fantastic claim is made (Mechanistic Causation).
Faced with this problem, an LLM suggested I read Camus. Camus reframes the problem as not a paradox, but instead a starting point. If you accept that people yearn for meaning and the world fails to give you meaning, you can choose to rebel against the world's truth and apply meaning in your own life when appropriate. The sentiment has an appeal, but in practice, the call to action feels more cerebral than useful. A Christian can accept that bad things happen for a reason. The bad things are leading to a higher purpose, so the Christian can maintain optimism not only in spite of hardship, but because of it. An absurdist must accept hardship with grit, and choose to fight on.
I think this adds meaning to the story of Job that I never saw before. You can take the story as a narrator in a god-like position explaining how to keep a person happy and functioning to the breaking point with zero input from you. Essentially armed with monotheistic indoctrination, the person will be a useful member of society through just about infinite hardship. The story is a strong pitch to governments to allow their citizens to adopt religion.
But what do you do if you aren't Job and you aren't Sisyphus? I don't have infinite optimism based on existentialism, and I don't have infinite grit. In real life practice, I think the answer is in thinking about life in two scopes. First, the snowball method, as evangelized by Dave Ramsey, has such huge psychological benefits, that I think it is the right starting point.
Rather than pushing a boulder up a hill, imagine pushing a snowball up a hill. This is doable. So you do it, and the snowball collects a little more snow, and it becomes the size of a watermelon. As you push the snowball up the hill, it continues to get bigger, but you continue to get stronger, or learn small tricks, or develop a network of people helping you push the snow boulder up the hill. This is the first step in my philosophy.
The second step is learning that the hill is finite. I'm not referring to death; I'm referring to actual challenges in life. From the ages 5 to about 22, I think my identity was based on doing well in school. This isn't a bad thing, but at some point that ended. My identity didn't reform around something else. I continue to think of myself as someone who does well on tests of aptitude and skill. But that hill has been surmounted, and it is not who I am anymore. Even though I am back in school at 40, it feels like a very small part of who I am. The crucible of academic rigor has no effect once a person's identity has already been fired in the kiln once.
So what do I do with this information? Am I frozen in time, never to grow or experience optimism again? No, this is not the end. I think at this point, the goal is to choose challenges that help me understand the world better. The third step in my philosophy is thus to recognize that there are many hills and challenges to conquer, and then pick amongst these hills/challenges, and do them to completion.
This is a kind of existentialism because it is building your life and identity around a collection of finite challenges. Each of those individual challenges has little to no meaning by themselves, but small incremental progress against the collection of challenges is rewarding. The optimism comes from realising that you can make progress. The growth comes from the progress itself.
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