Antidepressant, anti-anxiety, and anti-insomnia medication use surged by 21% from 2019 to 2020 in the U.S. Nearly one-third of new antidepressant users in 2020 had no history of use six months prior. Emergency room visits for suicide attempts among girls aged 12-17 rose by 26% in the summer of 2020 and escalated by another 50% in the winter of 2021. CDC data revealed a 28.5% increase in drug overdose deaths from April 2020 to April 2021, totaling 100,306 deaths. Synthetic opioids contributed to a 26% spike in overdose deaths, reaching 56,000-75,700 deaths. Those catastrophic numbers stem from the mandated social isolation from jobs, gyms, churches, restaurants, family, entertainment, sports, and travel. These tragic statistics seem to reveal the deeper philosophical sickness plaguing the hearts and minds of Americans. Public health agencies now classify these deaths as “death by despair.”
The public lockdowns, ordained for the Glory of God, prompted Americans to halt distractions and confront the emptiness of their belief in an uncreated cosmos. This exposure unveiled the existential underbelly in America, paving the way to rediscovering one’s genuine purpose in God. The remedy lies in Christian hope, facilitating a transformative shift from despair to desperation as individuals recognize and embrace the inherent human longing for certainty, ultimately directing them toward Christ and the redemptive power of the Cross.
Existentialists criticize fleeing life’s “meaninglessness” and instead promote embracing the void. By keeping their lives busy, chaotic, and loud, humans tend to avoid dwelling on their lack of purpose. In C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters, Screwtape, a demon, boasts, “We will make the whole universe a noise. The melodies and silences of heaven will be shouted down in the end.” This life of noise that Screwtape strives to create in “his” human is precisely what 19th Century German Existentialist Martin Heidegger condemns as living the “inauthentic life.” In his seminal work entitled Being and Time, Heidegger begins his ontological structure with man’s dasein, which translates literally to “being there.” Humans, he argues, find themselves hurled into life and forced between manifesting the inauthentic or the authentic life: “The inauthentic man makes uncritical assumptions… [is] preoccupied with everyday concerns… [and] his thought life is merely an exercise in distraction.” On the other hand, Heidegger describes the archetypal authentic man who rejects any form of escapism, confronts the anxiety-inspiring nothingness, and comes to grips with his meaninglessness. Following Heidegger’s ontology of man’s randomness, Jean-Paul Sartre, a 20th-century French Philosopher, further developed the existentialist worldview. When questioned in a lecture on his dictum that man’s existence precedes essence, Sartre explained, “We mean that man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world,” and through this experience, man defines himself.
Though tempting, Sartre’s message of self-creation and empowering freedom is the most dangerous of half-truths. Prominent self-help author Nathan W. Morris, unknowingly invoking Sartre, writes, “Edit your life frequently and ruthlessly. It’s your masterpiece, after all.” The fundamental and darker catch to such absolute freedom of identity is the sacrifice of objective essence, and what follows is freedom from morality. Therefore, when Christians offer up encouraging niceties like “find yourself,” “follow your heart,” and “you are enough,” they too unknowingly endorse a worldview grounded in man’s lack of purpose and subjective morality; herein lies the falsehood. Albert Camus, another French existentialist, introduces and defines the doctrine of the Absurd (heavily relying on Heidegger’s dasein) as the relationship between the “mind that desires [meaning] and the world that disappoints.” The recognition of the Absurd strikes a nerve in all human beings as it concedes the reality of the soul’s outcry for real meaning. Therein, the half-truth.
The biblical worldview shares with existentialism the inescapability of the Absurd. From the outset, King Solomon in Ecclesiastes Chapter 1, Verse 1 decries the meaninglessness of human existence, writing, “[V]anity of vanities! All is vanity. What does man gain by all he toils under the sun? A generation goes, and a generation comes, but the earth remains.” In the original Hebrew, the translation of vanity is hevel, which more literally translated means “void,” “nothingness,” or “absurdity.” Thus, the seemingly angsty nihilist or existentialist belief that “all human accomplishments are ultimately devoid of meaning” is found already in God’s Word. Truly, nothing is new under the sun.
Arriving at existentialism as a conclusion and believing in a meaningless cosmos and existence leads to “deaths-by-despair,” yet there is a true metaphysical antidote to the American pandemic of absurdity. 17th Century philosopher and physicist Blaise Pascal reveals such ignorance in avoiding Christian hope: “An heir finds the title deeds of his house. Will he say, “Perhaps they are forged?” and neglect to examine them?” Many years later, C.S. Lewis in his book Mere Christianity formulates the Argument from Desire, writing, “Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists…If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.” By channeling America’s despair into desperation, we can convert the nation’s transgressions into transformation. As we, the people, partake in the spiritual sustenance offered by Christ and His Cross, we pave the way for repentance, renewal, and redemption.
