The Existentialist's Survival Guide

A motivational and inspirational guide to living in the twenty-first century—when every crisis feels like an existential crisis.

“An honest and moving book of self-help for readers generally disposed to loathe the genre.” —The Wall Street Journal

Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-Paul Sartre, and other towering figures of existentialism grasped that human beings are, at heart, moody creatures, susceptible to an array of psychological setbacks, crises of faith, flights of fancy, and other emotional ups and downs. Rather than understanding moods—good and bad alike—as afflictions to be treated with pharmaceuticals, this swashbuckling group of thinkers generally known as existentialists believed that such feelings not only offer enduring lessons about living a life of integrity, but also help us discern an inner spark that can inspire spiritual development and personal transformation. To listen to Kierkegaard and company, how we grapple with these feelings shapes who we are, how we act, and, ultimately, the kind of lives we lead.

In The Existentialist’s Survival Guide, Gordon Marino, director of the Hong Kierkegaard Library at St. Olaf College and boxing correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, recasts the practical takeaways existentialism offers for the twenty-first century. From negotiating angst, depression, despair, and death to practicing faith, morality, and love, Marino dispenses wisdom on how to face existence head-on while keeping our hearts intact, especially when the universe feels like it’s working against us and nothing seems to matter.

What emerges are life-altering and, in some cases, lifesaving epiphanies—existential prescriptions for living with integrity, courage, and authenticity in an increasingly chaotic, uncertain, and inauthentic age.

“Brilliant . . . Gives existentialism a twenty-first century presence more gripping, nuanced, and convincing than in its initial American portrayal sixty years ago. . . . The prose is electric, illustrating the point that existentialism is also literary.” —The Los Angeles Review of Books

“A remarkable book. We can’t think of another writer who so thoroughly understands Kierkegaard and his followers, presents their thought more accessibly than they themselves did, and—crucially—relates them concretely to the dark places in his own life, and ours.” —Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein, authors of Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar and Heidegger and a Hippo Walk Through Those Pearly Gates