The Existentialist's Survival Guide: How to Live Authentically in an Inauthentic Age

Gordon Marino

Apr 2018 · HarperOne · Narrated by Joe Knezevich

About this audiobook

Existentialism offers enduring lessons and insight on how to understand ourselves and improve our lives.

Your existence is not the result of a pre-determined set of events, it’s the direct result of your thinking and your actions, and therefore, according to Soren Kierkegaard, Frederick Nietzsche, Albert Camus, and other Existentialist philosophers, you have the freedom to control the outcome of your existence—sophisticated ""philosophy meets psychology"" self-help for the twenty-first-century.

As Kierkegaard and his ilk made clear in their respective works, human beings are moody creatures. Rather than understanding moods such as anxiety and depression as afflictions that can only be treated with a pill, the Existentialists regard these troublesome feelings as instructive, something revealing about what it means to be human. The Existentialists believed that how we negotiate our emotional ups-and-downs plays an important hand in the lives we sculpt for ourselves.

While offering listeners a useful primer on Existentialism as an animating body of thought, Marino distills and delivers the life-altering and, in some cases, life-saving insights Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Camus, and other Existentialists articulate for becoming more emotionally attuned human beings. Enhancing our sense of meaning in the midst of an uncertain world, Marino interjects gripping anecdotes from his own experiences to demonstrate how we can use existentialist thought to ignite truly transformative experiences.

Ratings and reviews

Obvious Christian bias made the book unbearable. This is a book about existentialism not christianity. No mention of any other religions to give a fuller balance of the points being made when a religious point needs to be made. I did not want to get preached at but the author preaches a lot of Christians specific values. very upset by the intense biases in this book.

About the author

Gordon Marino is a professor of philosophy and the director of the Hong Kierkegaard Library at St. Olaf College. He is the author of Kierkegaard in the Present Age, coeditor of The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard, and editor of Basic Writings of Existentialism, Ethics: The Essential Writings, and The Quotable Kierkegaard. A veteran boxing trainer, Marino is also an award-winning boxing writer for The Wall Street Journal and other outlets. His work has appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic, Newsweek, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and many other domestic and international publications. He lives in Northfield, Minnesota.