Existentialism in a Capitalist World
By Kalika Padte
Imitation is a tangible, temperamental asset, a performance that binds us in a stoic fashion, replicating only those aspects of existence which amplify survival, particularly modern-day survival. This essay begins as an abrupt plunge into something close to the truth, wrapped in denial, haphazardly announcing a raw, reckless reality that many of us brush past without ever stopping to examine.
Our lives have rooted themselves into systems and structures that we established to manufacture the formal illusion of freedom. Dedicated to maintaining law and order, these systems seeped into our existence and became defining features of it. A profitable job, a successful inventory, a law-abiding citizen, an AI application that optimises the human experience; all of it. Tech aggregates grow in seconds, and structural accuracy becomes the centre of attention. If one gets the structure right, one can live a happy life. Or so the structure insists.
Michel Foucault’s work on biopolitics and biopower illuminates precisely how predatory systems sound less predatory when structural benefits are made accessible to the masses. These advantages are designed first as luxuries, then engineered into survival necessities, optimised until they are indispensable in daily life. Once luxury becomes necessity, consumption amplifies and to fulfil those necessities, the most readily available choice for the masses is to voluntarily subjugate themselves to the very systems that manufactured the need. The loop continues, and we are both its product and its fuel.
A capitalistic slave is not born; it is self-made, stretched along the borders of excruciating labour, dedicating precious time to advocate for needs that were embellished onto them through soft power. And they carry these needs as though they make a genuine difference to their existence. It is rightly said that only a slave quantifies existence through productivity, but the more insidious truth is that the slave eventually internalises this quantification so thoroughly that productivity ceases to feel like a demand and begins to feel like identity.
The loss of existential resonance is persistent throughout this experience of making meaning, which is often rooted in the palatable cages of lies. Humans start becoming statistically relevant rather than fundamentally relevant. An eight-year-old child with a phone is not only the death of pensiveness and practical thought, but the early making of a consumer, which is catnip for the expansion of capitalism. The systems feed off each other, and we ensure they are well-fed by exhausting our own resources.
What capitalism quietly engineers is not just physical dependence, but an existential one. When systems pre-assign your values, your ambitions, your definition of a life well-lived, they are not merely influencing you; they are doing the philosophical work that was always supposed to be yours. The question that lingers, uncomfortably, underneath all of this is: if the self is already furnished before you arrive at it, is there a self at all? This is precisely where existentialism seeps into a fractured reality.
Things take a drastic turn when consciousness itself is trivialised, and power hands you a desiccated version of it, a condition in which awareness is a trap and ignorance is a bigger one. Awareness, in this context, only allows you to perceive those things made available to you, those things that stumble into your echo chamber. Ignorance, on the other hand, becomes a neutral emotional state of living that conceals catastrophic realities and projects a tailored one in their place; no wars, no atrocities, no calamities, just the illusion of soft living in an apocalyptic world.
A consumer is raised. A product is raised. An algorithm is satisfied, while emotion, vitality, and longevity are quietly jeopardised. A formulated reality hands us the keys to an ideal, future-facing freedom while actively consuming what remains of us right now. Descartes once argued that there is no way to reliably separate a dream from a real experience. In the modern world, there is equally no way to separate a nightmare from the reality we inhabit, where fast-paced life is mistaken for progress, and dissociation is the cost of keeping up.
Existentialism, in its truest sense, bothers the unbothered, questions the unquestioned, and holds ground for that deviant part of the population that genuinely wants to live and not simply evaporate in a capitalist mist. Being an existentialist in a capitalistic world is something close to a felony, because it means abandoning the structures that wanted to hand you a roadmap and tell you how to live. It is also, for this reason, the most difficult thing to actually pursue.
Sartre, the father of existentialism, argued that existence precedes essence; that we arrive in the world without a predetermined nature and are condemned to create one through our choices. Capitalism doesn’t refute this. It quietly circumvents it, stepping in before the individual ever reaches the moment of self-creation and furnishing the self in advance.
The jarring truth of today’s world is that systems have moved to offer us this essence free of charge. They supply pre-packaged values, thoughts, opinions, and identities, delivered quietly and efficiently, while we float around the world carrying them as our own. There is a predetermined essence already waiting for us, and it has been shaped not by our experience but by what is useful to the system i.e. identities with practical utility, identities that are compliant enough to replenish the machine by remaining voluntarily passive.
In realistic terms, “getting ready for the real world” is not merely a matter of being adaptive. It is a matter of being so thoroughly sacrificial that one would surrender meaning itself, the very thing that makes a person who they are, in exchange for a few perishable resources. With a severe decay in individualism, what remains is an intentional dissonance that slowly preys upon us while we reach for naïve explanations to account for the wrongness we feel but cannot quite name.
Existentialism is not a cure, but it is relatively closer to the cure than anything ever objectively has been. Living the life of a monk is no longer a realistic prescription, not now, when we cannot see past our devices and our dopamine hits. But examining our essences, poking holes in them, questioning what we have absorbed and why; this matters. The essences we have been consuming without scrutiny may well become the single determinant in the making and breaking of our lives.
We are specks of dust in this universe. Yes. And a thousand such specks of dust, in genuine collective consciousness, can begin to override the propagated truths that took up residence in our psyches like permanent guests, truths that burgeon into our existence while simultaneously serving as our only available source of comfort.
Existentialism sounds like the imposter in a numerical world. It does not fit the algorithmic DNA. It threatens those who have come to depend on temporary outbursts of depth to offset their mundanity, and it terrifies those who learnt to live by rules but could never recognise the patterns underneath them. The irony is sharp, but if we allow it to seep deeper than the systems that contain us, the will to live might yet emerge from the walls that have kept us so passive, so contained, for so long.
Existentialism is not arbitrarily positioned against capitalism; it is structurally opposed to it. If capitalism’s deepest power lies in pre-assigning essence, in handing you an identity shaped by utility and consumption before you have had the chance to construct one yourself, then a philosophy whose entire foundation rests on the radical freedom to create meaning from scratch is not merely a counter-cultural gesture. It is a direct philosophical dismantling of the system’s most fundamental assumption; that you can be defined before you define yourself. To practice existentialism in a capitalist world is not to escape the system; that is neither possible nor the point. It is to remain conscious within it, to keep authoring yourself even when everything around you insists the story has already been written.
Bibliography
Descartes, René. Meditations on First Philosophy. 1641.
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction. Translated by Robert Hurley, Pantheon Books, 1978.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. Existentialism Is a Humanism.
Kalika Padte is a Mumbai-based self-published author and a student, exploring philosophy, psychology, existentialism, art and emotional reality. Her debut prose and poetry collection, Eidolon carries similar thematic undertones. A poet at heart, her diverse body of work also includes thought essays, articles, and literary pieces.
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“No system can actually determine my essence unless I allow it.”
That is probably how Sartre would have replied.
I really liked your line that systems are “doing the philosophical work that was always supposed to be yours.” That captures the way modern technologies and institutions increasingly compete to shape our identities.
However, I disagree that “being an existentialist in a capitalist world is something close to a felony.” Sartre’s radical freedom is more demanding, and more hopeful, than that. Systems can make self-authorship more difficult. But can they ever truly determine our essence? Sartre would probably insist that even accepting a pre-packaged identity remains a choice, however constrained.
And perhaps Foucault would add that freedom is exercised within relations of power, not outside them. The point is not to escape the system but to remain capable of questioning it.
To me, that’s where the real philosophical tension lies: not between existentialism and capitalism as such, but between our responsibility to author ourselves and the increasingly sophisticated environments competing to do that work for us. Resistance is both possible and necessary, not by standing outside the system, but by refusing to surrender that responsibility from within it.
Amazing read! It really resonated with me, thanks for sharing! I might let this sink in a bit and give it a truly deserved reread. In the meantime, I’d love to know if there’s more material to dive deeper on the topic (besides the bibliography indicated). I feel like this topic is really important and needed to find meaning in today’s society