“We are not machines. We are not abstractions. We are human, embodied, embedded, and in revolt.”
Something Isn’t Working
We live in a world that has mistaken speed for progress, information for wisdom, and optimisation for meaning. In pursuing “more”, more productivity, growth, and freedom to consume, we have created systems that make us anxious, lonely, burned out, and ecologically endangered.
Capitalism promised us individual freedom but delivered alienation. Marxism promised us collective emancipation, but often reduced our lives to the logic of class and labour. Both traditions, in their dominant forms, have treated human beings not as sacred mysteries but as problems to be solved or resources to be deployed.
What if we began again?
What if we dared to build a philosophy of life rooted in the whole, contradictory, tender reality of being human, not as an idealised subject or economic actor, but as a fragile, mortal being embedded in a world of other beings?
This is the proposal of Existential Materialism: a way of seeing, living, and creating that brings together the ontological and the material, the personal and the political, the philosophical and the ecological.
What Is Existential Materialism?
Existential Materialism is a response and a revolt.
It refuses to accept that we must choose between individual meaning, systemic justice, spiritual freedom, and economic reality. Instead, it holds that:
We are beings of freedom, situated within material conditions. We make choices, but not in a vacuum. We long for meaning, but we do so with bodies, histories, limitations, and needs.
Existential Materialism is not a utopia. It’s not a blueprint. It’s a compass, pointing toward a way of living and organising society that starts from a simple truth:
To be human is to be both a subject and a body, both a meaning-maker and a material creature.
Why Capitalism and Marxism Are Not Enough
1. Capitalism reduces freedom to consumer choice.
In the capitalist imagination, freedom means having options, buying what you want, when you want, as a sovereign individual. But beneath this lies a profound alienation. Our lives are increasingly defined by market logic: success becomes status, identity becomes brand, care becomes service, and even rest is repackaged as productivity.
Capitalism thrives by severing us from life's ecological, relational, and existential dimensions. It demands constant growth on a finite planet. It encourages endless self-optimisation while ignoring collective suffering. It tells us we are free while exploiting our labour, commodifying our attention, and atomising our communities.
2. Marxism, in its classical form, reduces being to class.
Marxism was correct in criticising capitalism's exploitative structure. But too often, it has replaced economic domination with economic reductionism. It has tended to flatten the human condition into class struggle, alienation from labour, and historical determinism.
Existential questions like love, death, meaning, despair, and transcendence are often considered secondary, even bourgeois. But these questions do not go away. They are not luxuries. They are what make life worth living.
We do not live only as workers or consumers. We live as sons, daughters, friends, lovers, artists, believers, wanderers, and seekers. A materialist politics that ignores these dimensions is incomplete and ultimately, inhuman.
The Ontological and the Material
Traditional philosophy often divides the world into being (what we are) and having (what we possess), spirit and matter, freedom and necessity. Existential Materialism dissolves this binary.
We are always both.
- I am free, but I am also embodied, gendered, racialised, and situated.
- I make meaning, but I do so within the limitations of language, history, culture, and trauma.
- I long for transcendence but am grounded in a fragile planet and a finite life.
Existential Materialism insists on the inseparability of freedom, form, spirit, and system. It says: you are not reducible to your circumstances, but neither are you independent of them.
Simone de Beauvoir meant this when she wrote, “To will oneself free is also to will others free.” That is: your liberation is bound to mine. My freedom unfolds in relationship, not in isolation.
Principles of Existential Materialism
Here are some of the guiding beliefs at the heart of this emerging framework:
1. Being precedes owning.
A person’s worth is not based on wealth, status, productivity, or output. Human life is sacred in and of itself.
2. Freedom is absolute, but situated.
We are not purely determined by society or biology. We are not gods, either. We are meaning-making creatures shaped by, and responding to, our context.
3. Care is foundational.
We are vulnerable beings. We come into the world needing care and spend our lives needing each other. Any society that ignores this is in denial of reality.
4. Ecology is not optional.
The Earth is not a resource. It is our condition. We are ecological beings, embedded in webs of life. Existential crisis and environmental crisis are two faces of the same wound.
5. Ambiguity is essential.
There are no perfect systems or final answers. We must live with complexity, contradiction, and the unknown. This is not a weakness but a form of honesty.
Work, Time, and the Soul
One of the most explicit expressions of our current malaise is how we relate to work.
In a capitalist society, work is everything. It defines your identity, your worth, your dignity. But increasingly, work is unmoored from meaning. It becomes a treadmill: long hours, low pay, burnout, and disconnection.
Even the so-called “helping professions” are forced to prioritise output over intimacy, outcomes over ethics.
Existential Materialism proposes a radical reorientation: What if work were a form of care? A way to participate in life, not dominate it?
This doesn’t mean rejecting structure or effort. It means rejecting systems that demand we sacrifice our well-being and integrity for the illusion of progress.
Time, too, must be reclaimed. We are not meant to live constantly online, constantly responsive, constantly visible. The soul needs slowness, reflection, absence, grief, and silence.
A Politics of Enough
Existential Materialism offers the beginnings of a political philosophy, but not one driven by conquest or ideology. Instead, it asks what humans need to flourish, individually and together.
- Enough food, shelter, and security
- Enough time to rest, reflect, and create
- Meaningful relationships
- A healthy environment
- A sense of belonging
- A right to mystery, doubt, and transformation
This is not about retreating from politics. It is about grounding politics in the human, not as an abstraction but as a felt reality. We want a society that honours our limits and potential, our interdependence and our uniqueness.
Therapy, Resistance, and Love
Existential Materialism is not just a social theory. It is a way of seeing the self.
Many of today’s mental health struggles, depression, anxiety, and derealisation, are not simply personal disorders. They are responses to a dehumanising system.
Many people feel broken in a world that values productivity over presence and speed over soul. But perhaps we are not broken. Maybe we are responding, as humans do, when they are denied care, meaning, connection, and hope.
Existential therapy already touches these truths, honouring the individual as a meaning-maker. But treatment must also go further. It must acknowledge that meaning is not only found inside the self but also in the world. And when the world is sick, the soul suffers.
To heal is to resist, gently, persistently, relationally.
To love, in any form, is a refusal of despair.
What Comes Next?
Existential Materialism is not a finished system. It’s an invitation to reimagine life, work, care, politics, and selfhood from the ground up, based on lived experience.
It asks us to slow down. To remember what matters. To ask again and again:
- What kind of world do we want to live in?
- What does it mean to be fully human?
- How do we build a society that recognises enough as a virtue, not a failure?
These are not small questions. They are existential. And they are material. They belong to all of us. If this resonates with you and if you’ve felt the ache of disconnection, the discomfort with systems that don’t reflect your values, the desire for a way of life that honours your being, then you’re already part of this. Existential Materialism belongs to anyone who chooses to live otherwise.
The future is unwritten, but it will be human, or it will not be at all.
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