Hell is Social Media

In Sartre's "Huis Clos" aka "No Exit", Sartre's famous remark from the translated edition, Hell is other people, does not necessarily mean that the mere presence of other people, of living in a interdependent world is comparable to the fiery pits of Satan's domain.

However, in the particular case of Joseph Garcin, Ines Serrano, and Estelle Rigault, three damned souls who are transported to what they believe to be Hell in the after life--they are trying to figure out exactly what their torture will consist of and what the others in the room have been condemned for.

 

In the process of discovering the others, each of the three characters begin to spiral into their inner most secrets. Into the sins that brought them to hell. They draw out the worst in one another and begin to slowly fade out from any connection to their time on earth. As each character is forgotten by someone still alive, their tenuous link to their mortality is extinguished slowly. In the closing, Joseph remarks that the real torture was not to come from devices or physical punishment--but from the other two people. Joseph doomed to want Estelle to love him for himself and to think of him as a man, not a coward. Estelle miserably feigns attraction to get Joseph to give her affection. Ines is so deep in her despair and bitterness that she wrecks Estelle's attempts to seduce Joseph and out of spite, will cause misery to Joseph for all of eternity.

This need to be heard, recognized, understood, loved, admired, adored, championed. What are the correlations between the excruciating, hyper-focus on how others see us and our relationship to ourselves? In what ways can Sartre's play serve us in the 21st century?

According to a 2013 eMarketer report, "Worldwide Social Network Users: 2013 Forecast and Comparative Estimates," nearly one in four people worldwide will use social networks in 2013. The number of social network users around the world will rise from 1.47 billion in 2012 to 1.73 billion this year, an 18% increase.

1.73 billion. That is quite a number. Many of my peers and I have grown up with a constant internet connection. With the advent of social networks, from Xanga, LiveJournal, forums, instant messenger, Myspace, etc., there has never been a time since I was 11 years old that I did not have an internet alias of some sort. Where I was not able to talk with real life friends online or create friends over the internet. With the success of Facebook in uniting hold classmates, lovers, grandparents and frenemies, the change of social networking to become less about personal expression and more about social recognition and one-upmanship has more common. 

I remember talking to my roommate about how the constant news-feeds, timelines, etc of Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat were frustrating and exhaustive. She agreed and also added that she personally never felt the need to express genuine emotions on those sites. She would rather paint a portrait of success and positivity because others do not deserve the complexity of her truths or her life. What some may deem as inauthentic, she categorized as privacy and ownership of her personal narrative. 

But what of this performance of positivity that seems to dominate the way young adults use social media? Sure there are countless outliers persistently paving the way to bring about a more authentic and multifaceted engagement with social media (those who are open about their personal struggles or triumphs with mental illness, financial hardships, activism, etc), but the overwhelming manner way to use these platforms of communication is - to put it like Elsa from Frozen- conceal and not feel.

The bombardment of other people's life news, of their engagements, and job promotions, their graduations and baby showers-- of writing countless happy birthdays because you logged in on the right day and Facebook reminded you, of sharing videos of hope and resilience, of constantly curbing our less savory emotions in order to paint a portrait of health, wealth and thriving success in order to show others that, yes we are doing well, everything is ok, I am doing better than you. All of this creates a constricting and suffocating dimension to logging in to see what's new. It is a false reality that may create resentment with social media as a whole. With the need to be constantly updated and to continue a charade of letting folks "keep up" with your life. 

FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) becomes a permanent part of our psyche as we scroll through glossy travel photo after travel photo. We disingenuously like celebratory status after status in order to perform goodness. But the opposite, of deciding to reject the politics of recognition, of not seeking the approval of others and their definitions of who we are, is unfathomable as of now. There is a long ways to go until a healthy relationship can be formed between us and these totems of representation, of these avatars of our souls that exist in small profile pictures.

If Hell is other people, and other people are now one swipe away, then can we say hell is social media? 

Sara Goldfarb's Birth of her own Tragedy

In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche posits that art, particularly tragic art, has the ability to cure the nausea one experiences after re-entering everyday reality after engulfed in the Dionysian state.

It is a balm that soothes the turmoil within our beings after seeing the true nature of living, the death and destruction inherent in the history of the world. 

Requiem for a Dream (2000) is an example of a tragic performance meant to evoke an affirmative life lesson, but when I watched it, it could be argued that the ending instead signals relentless despair and a failure to accept the true nature of life--one that leaves viewers with less of a cheerful passivity but a sobering, stasis of apollonian delusion.

Nietzsche states in The Birth of Tragedy (BT),  that the Greeks knew how to affirm life for all of its beauty and destruction through the doctrine of tragedy. The essential knowledge that all humans will die and become a part of the nothingness of the universe is what becomes uncovered in the Greek tragic plays. The duality of the Apollonian and Dionysian become clearer and clearer throughout each section of BT and we are able to articulate the oppositional nature as such: for the ‘Delphic god’, Apollo is the god of truth and is associated with sculpture, divination, dreams, contemplation, and illusion.

The establishing scene of the film shows a standoff between Sara and her son, Henry, who pawns her television set in order to purchase some narcotics. This is later revealed to be a routine occurrence when in a follow-up scene Sara explains her reasonings to the pawn shop owner on why she continuously relents to her son’s addiction as opposed to seeking help for him. Thus we are introduced to Sara Goldfarb, our elderly main character in Requiem, a widow with a son addicted to heroin who spends most of her twilight years in front of the television.

It is this routine, mundane moment- a commercial for a juice-based diet looping endlessly-when she gets her dream call that she is a winner to be a contestant on a tv show. Her fixation thus turns from watching television to being on television. This obsession particularly manifests in a desire to lose weight in order to gain a sense of self confidence back and as it is later shown, to harken back to a time where things were still alright in her family as exemplified in the motif of the red dress she wears in a photo of Henry’s high school graduation.

In the photo, her husband was still alive, her son Henry  had an infinite amount of possibility when it came to life, and she still fit a certain red dress. This red dress becomes the main focus of her life and she unfortunately becomes addicted to amphetamines prescribed by a dietician in order to help her lose weight. What she ends up losing is her sanity.

Each of the character’s drug use is an attempt to fulfill their desires but fall short of this and end up as simply delusions. Sara in particular breaks down in one scene to Henry who is questioning her apparent drug use, and  frankly states that she has nothing left to live for. Why is it so wrong that she loses herself in her television, when Henry isn’t around, her husband has died, and the crux of it all- she is old, and therefore facing the capital T, TRUTH, of nature. Her youth is gone, the winter of her discontent is nigh and she is coping. Not through an Oedipal passivity, or a Promethean activity, but an apollonian illusion that if she appeared on television just once, people will love her and her life will have true meaning.

We can interpret the character of Sara Goldfarb as the drunken reveler described by Nietzsche in TBoT, who upon sinking into dionysian revelry, mistakes the hallucinations therein as messages from the gods and remains in stasis. Replace the ‘Gods’ with the prominence of television and the banality of modernity and Sara fits right into place with masses of other individuals searching for their meaning in a ‘veil of forgetfulness’ that they have forgotten are illusions.

We see this nullification of the will through the habitual intake of hard drugs for the main characters sublimated into what we describe earlier as a pathologic necessity. The obliteration of the will when re-entering consciousness after the euphoric effects of the drugs creates a dependency that makes everyday reality a nauseating experience that-towards the end of the film- cannot be assuaged with art or a fervent affirmation of life through art. Addiction is the apollonian logic taken to its conclusion. But the tragic affirmation of life isn’t in the cliched arguments many viewers may come away with after watching the film. It is the reality that underneath the anti-drug abuse warnings proliferated throughout the film there is a deep human yearning to escape our inevitable truth and the despair that accompanies that inevitability.

A serious man

According to mythology, the hero Sisyphus was condemned by the gods to make a futile and hopeless labor for life. Live without expectations, without ambitions for the future. But to get carried away by the melancholy of an absurdity that does not free is to live like Sisyphus in misfortune day to day.

For Camus, absurdity is something inexplicable, is something that takes man's account and that becomes part of his life and he does not even notice. Live a life where everything is hopeless and useless, like Sisyphus is condemned to repeat the same effort every day, it is the greatest proof of the absurd.

It would be a way to exit this monotony of life man, suicide, thus seeking freedom? Through suicide man would arrive at a false hope to get away with nonsense. Find that life does not deserve to be lived and let corrupt themselves by the absurdity of illusions, is the way in which man begins to be consumed by suicide.

His absurdity emphases the idea that there is not rational foundation to moral orders but we should not despair. He defends that we should entertain death instead of suicide, Life may be absurd however there is no need to feel an urgency for death or despair.

A Serious Man is a film about the search for meaning, and in that search we find no meaning at all. The film applies Camus’s philosophy. What happens when science and religion fails as an explanation or comfort instruments for a common man immersed in a series of misfortunes? How do science and religion fail when trying to account for the presence of evil in everyday life? These are the central themes of intriguing and provocative film from the Coen brothers' "A Serious Man".

The film's protagonist, Larry Gopnik is a decent man. But it is also an uncertain man. He wants to be "a serious man" but seems unable to find the necessary spiritual certainty. The more he seeks this certainty, more elusive it becomes, creating a series of tragicomic situations.

Larry is a professor of physics that after receiving a bribe of a disgruntled student that was failed in a test finds that his unhappy wife makes plans to leave him. In addition, there is an anonymous letter threatening his career at the university. Larry also has to deal with the problems of Arthur, his brother, who lives in your home and sleeps on the couch; his son Danny, troublesome and rebellious; and still Sarah, his daughter, who constantly takes money from his wallet for a future plastic surgery on the nose. Without knowing what to do, Larry seeks advice from three rabbis.

I think Professor Gopnik can be an absurdist character. He finds his life framed by the prospect of death and thus he searches for meaning but finds none. It was only when Sisyphus accepted and forgot his fate that he could be content to keep on pushing the rock, and perhaps it is only when Gopnik accepts and forgets the mysteries of his life that he can be content to keep on. If he accepts the mystery, even, he might become happy to do this, like Sisyphus must be understood to be content to keep rolling his stone uphill.

Progress? Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex and Modern Feminism

Simone de Beauvoir, who died in 1986, became a pioneering figure for many within the feminist movement due the publication of her work Le Deuxième Sexe in 1949. Her celebrated statement, “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman,” was, and still is, highly influential and widely circulated. But how relevant is The Second Sex in today’s context? Have Beauvoir’s ideas been misinterpreted and distorted? Or, are we making progress towards reversing what she considered to be women’s position as the ‘other’, constantly overshadowed, in comparison to the overarching dominance of men? It is these questions that I am hoping to make some progress towards answering, or at the very least consider.

‘Feminism’ and all the misconceptions attached to it within modern society are often incendiary talking points. It is something that I have noticed more so in the UK (but maybe that’s just because I can speak the language and so understand what’s going on), but everyone has a strong and divided opinion, which largely seems to be one of either two groups. I have to say I was somewhat scared of writing this blog post as I know how strong these opinions sometimes are, and if you have the wrong one you’re stupid. Although it varies in a university environment due to the more liberal way of thinking generally associated with students, amongst many others if you deem yourself a ‘feminist’ it means you are automatically a man-hater. On the other hand if you say you aren’t a ‘feminist’, you hate women, believe men are better in every possible way etc, etc. It can be tiring, to say the least, and are in many ways divisions that could be entirely avoided if we devoid the word of all the negative connotations it currently possessed, and strip it back to its true meaning.

In light of all this, I really enjoyed reading the introduction to The Second Sex to attempt to understand some original feminist notions. In essence, it seems to me that what Beauvoir argues is that the male gaze has become institutionalised to the extent that the possibilities available to women are entirely delimited, and they are consequently viewed as the ‘other’, the inferior sex. The man is the essential, sovereign subject. For Beauvoir, however, as existence precedes essence, these ideals of femininity are entirely constructed, and it is societal structures imposed upon us that cause us to ‘become a woman’, one with this limited field of possibilities. She considers that, “Every female being is not necessarily a woman; to be so considered she must share in that mysterious and threatened reality known as femininity.”

One aspect of The Second Sex that I found pertinent to the controversy associated with the modern feminist movement was when she states, “People have tirelessly sought to prove that woman is superior, inferior or equal to man…If we are to gain understanding, we must get out of these ruts; we must discard the vague notions of superiority, inferiority and equality which have hitherto corrupted every discussion of the subject and start afresh.” This is something that I feel many people today do not adhere to: we become so focused on achieving absolute equality that we forget freedom and the end of oppression are what should be the ultimate end goals. Furthermore, it should be actions that serve the universal cause of freedom, and not one restricted to certain groups, i.e. women. An overarching acceptance is of upmost importance.

Regarding the relevance of The Second Sex and any progress we have made towards Beauvoir’s end goals, I believe that the fact that we are at least attempting to fight for liberation means something, even if it is at times slightly misguided. Beauvoir is critical in her work of women who act in complicity with the world established by men, and holds them in disregard: they live an inauthentic existence and deny their freedom. She is critical of Western women of that era who were aware of their oppression and yet did nothing about it, because it allows them to live without the fundamental existential struggle. In her words, “Refusing to be the Other, refusing all complicity with man, would mean renouncing all the advantages an alliance with the superior caste confers on them.” Beauvoir lived a controversial life, to say the least, and one that was always characterised by her relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre. Her non-conformity to the ideals of marriage that were still highly present when she was alive shows how she valued freedom above all else. 

Although I don’t agree with absolutely everything that Beauvoir argues in The Second Sex, its position as both a revolutionary feminist text is undeniable, and the notions it contains are, I believe, still relevant, even if less so. Gender constructs are now something widely recognised, and I believe we have made partial progress towards reversing these, despite the struggle attached. I also feel women are now less complicit with the world of men, and are continually engaged in our struggle for freedom. But, that is not to say there aren’t difficulties associated with the movement, and the misconceptions surrounding it need to be addressed.  In my opinion, we need to stop thinking that it’s ‘us’ against ‘them’, not only in feminism but really in any liberation movement.

I’d be really interested to hear other people’s thoughts on this matter, so please feel free to comment!

How does Katniss Everdeen proove that no one is human?

This weekend, I had the idea to hang out few hours to escape from my sad student condition:  reviewing my lessons for final exams. Thus, I decided to go to the cinema to watch the very last episode of Hunger Games.

(By the way, if you really love Hunger Games as I did, PLEASE DO NOT SEE THIS EPISODE. I’ve never seen an end so cliché. And I’ve never laughed so much at the view of someone dying. Disgusting.)

Anyway, Hunger Games tells the story of Katniss Everdeen, a young girl who lives in a country run by the Capitol. Capitol’s inhabitants are all healthy and way too rich and exhibitionist. They wear false rainbow eyelashes when the rest of the country is poor and tries to live hunting and farming. Each year, the Capitol organizes Hunger Games: two children of each district of the country are chosen (what a pleasure!) to struggle to death in an arena, under a dome plenty of cameras. Their struggle is broadcasted in the whole country, as a pointless TV serie like The Truman Show would be or like Secret Story. Nevertheless, as each year these children have to die until only one still alive, Katniss Everdeen, who was herself a survivor of the Games, decided to raise the whole country population against Capitol power.

Actually, this is only a basic story about politic and power. But as I was writing my final paper in this course this weekend, I could only watch this as a story of freedom. And be critical on this point.

Indeed, Katniss Everdeen was at first not free because the system of her country alienated her to the Capitol, which took away all of her assets while she was working. Then, she was not free because this same Capitol settled her under a dome. Hence, she decided to overthrow the power gathering the population of every district behind her. But even there, while struggling for freedom, she lost a part of her freedom. She had to play the role of the convener in front of the cameras. To arrange troops, she had to look pretty, to take her most compelling voice, and to literally act in fake war scenes. Consequently, where is her freedom? Moreover, I learnt (!!! THIS IS A SPOIL, sorry !!!) in this last episode that even her war peers and friends used her. She is only a tool, a being-in-itself as Sartre conceptualized it. She is an object for her army superiors and for the population, the rebels. Wanting to reach a being-for-itself, she felt into a being-for-others, without her agreement.

Furthermore, she wanted to escape from her condition at first because she thought that she was not free as a farmer. And that’s what the Capitol claims: “these people are not wise enough to think. They don’t deserve to be free, they don’t deserve an existence because they are not human, they are workers. Let’s use them to do our bad tasks and let’s enjoy our measureless treasures freely”. But the fact is that in the Capitol, people are not freer. They just follow the President voice and wear crazy clothes in crazy places. But if their first wish was to plant carrots all of their life, because they do love planting carrots, they forget this under the pressure of their society. Then they are no freer. They have everything they want but they are not free.

In other words, Hunger Games shows that every human condition offers less freedom that we could have if we spend our live struggling to obtain it. But even when we finally reach our goals, we remain unhappy, and we want to be freer.

“We are condemned to freedom” said Sartre. But we are also condemned to an infinite insatiability. This is a part of human characteristics to always want more.

Than, are we really condemned to be free? I would say yes. Because Sartre made this statement and that I’m far from being the next great philosopher of the century. So I harshly believe him. We have to be free to be a human. But if being a human means to be free, then we’ll just never be human. Because it is impossible to be free. Struggling for freedom may be a part of our human condition but the desire to always be better is another part. And both don’t match together.

Therefore, to be a human, I think that we should learn to live the absurdity, to love the absurdity, and do not expect anything from anyone, as Meursault did in The Stranger of Camus. Sartre suggested to face the bad faith and to understand that we could never escape from absurdity. Then let’s live this absurd life! We don’t need to be freer, but to accept everything that happens.

I tell myself that this is really weird to assume that, and neither Beauvoir, or Sartre, or even my consciousness would tolerate this statement. But it is a thought that get away from my brain when I saw people watching Katniss Everdeen struggling with no end and for nothing, like a fish in its bowl, soundless but delighting to the eye.

Oscar Wilde’s characters Lord Henry Wotton and Dorian Gray, the living pictures of the aristocratic hedonist in the aesthetic existence

When Soren Kierkegaard was describing the aesthetical life he had defined three stages: the “couch potato” (not his words though), which is the least valuable and interesting kind according to him, indeed the couch potato is only preoccupied by eating and copulating and he does not rank his pleasures (Homer Simpson could perhaps be an example of this kind of aesthete). The second stage is the business man, like the “couch potato” he is willing to satisfy the pleasure principle that rules animal life (seeks pleasure, and try to avoid harm and pain) however he is in competition with other people, he wants better things than them, which makes his life being more valuable and interesting according to Kierkegaard. The third stage of aesthetism which is much more interesting and valuable according to Kierkegaard is the stage of the “aristocratic hedonist”.  

The aristocratic hedonist, who is the most refined aesthete does still live by the pleasure principle but he tries to rank his pleasures so as to satisfy the purest ones and he rotates those pleasures so as to avoid boredom which is according to Kierkegaard eventually going to catch up the aesthete. The example of the aristocratic hedonist given by Kierkegaard is Oscar Wilde.

In this blog post I want to show that if Oscar Wilde is perhaps an example of the aristocratic hedonist, actually his characters Lord Henry Wotton and Dorian Gray in the brilliant novel The picture of Dorian Gray totally embodies the notion of aristocratic hedonism and refined aesthetism.

 

  

1)      They are living by the pleasure principle

Lord Henry and his close friend Dorian Gray are both living by the pleasure principle. Indeed they try are seeking for external pleasure. They try to relate to another BODY and never to another people (perhaps Dorian is trying in the beginning before being totally corrupted by the Lord Henry), for instance when he is asked whether he is happy or not, Dorian replies: “I have never searched for happiness. Who wants happiness? I have searched for pleasure.”

Lord Henry (who is inspired of Oscar Wilde himself, and has like Oscar Wilde a brilliant conversation and both are very fond of clever epigrams) explains that: “Believe me, no civilized man ever regrets a pleasure, and no uncivilized man ever knows what a pleasure is”

Moreover not only does Lord Henry seeks pleasure but he explains that it is the only thing that matters: “pleasure is the only things that deserve a theory”.

2)      They rank their pleasures and diversify them

Both are engaged in an endless quest for pleasure but they rank their pleasures and rotate them to avoid boredom. For instance, Lord Henry who smokes a countless number of cigarettes says “A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied. What more can one want?”

This being said he ranks pleasures to find the purest kinds of pleasure (as mentioned earlier, according to him cigarette is one of them) but also because he has a very high opinion of himself that’s also why he’s seeking to pure pleasure and beauty, as an aristocratic hedonist he despises vulgarity and poverty: “All crime is vulgar, just as all vulgarity is crime. It is not in you, Dorian, to commit a murder. I am sorry if I hurt your vanity by saying so, but I assure you it is true. Crime belongs exclusively to the lower orders. I don't blame them in the smallest degree. I should fancy that crime was to them what art is to us, simply a method of procuring extraordinary sensations.”

Dorian Gray is living by the moto of Lord Henry which is “nothing can cure the soul but senses” and then when he feels really down, he seeks for higher sensations of pleasure which he finds in opium (in fact this idea of rarifying the highest pleasure to preserve its value is one of the characteristics of the aristocratic hedonist according to Kierkegaard).

3)      Boredom and the feeling that they were masks and that they cannot be themselves is catching them

Lord Henry is engaged in an endless quest for pleasure as he tries to avoid boredom, he is very aware of this fact. Indeed he even tells Dorian: “The only horrible thing in the world is ennui, Dorian. That is the one sin for which there is no forgiveness”. This being said it turns out that Lord Henry does a good job in seeking for new and more refined pleasure (like trying to give new and pretty names to pretty things like flowers) and at the end of the novel it does not look like that boredom has caught him)

Otherwise, the very character of Dorian Gray embodies the haunting feeling of not being able to be himself. Indeed his soul is in the painting and his appearance is nothing but a mask that hides his hideous and twisted soul. As the story goes on, Dorian realize that he is a very bad person and he wants to change. However when he explains how he has spared an innocent girl that he wanted to seduce, Lord Henry replies that he only did this to experience a new kind of pleasure : ““I should think the novelty of the emotion must have given you a thrill of real pleasure, Dorian," Interrupted Lord Henry. “But I can finish your idyll for you. You gave her good advice, and broke her heart. That was the beginning of your reformation.”

(SPOILER ALERT)

After that, Dorian realizes that he is only wearing masks to hide his real Self: “In hypocrisy I had worn the mask of goodness”. And he stabs the painting in a desperate attempt to change and thus he destroys his real self and dies.

I hope you have enjoyed this blog post, I recommend those who have not to read The Picture of Dorian Gray and I wish you good luck for the midterm exams!

Sartre and Drake Explain Our Attraction to Weird People

It is no mistake that when speaking about an especially memorable person, we often say: “(s)he’s a real character.” The insertion of the word real in this phrase should come as no surprise when we consider what Sartre has to say about what he considers to be an authentic existence. The world character also has implications, in that this person is playing a role, which they had to have created, which sets them apart as not just any typical person.

What I am hinting towards here is Sartre’s theory that all existence amounts to nothingness. The reason we admire people who are different is because we recognize them asserting their own freedom and defining their essence and their individuality-- and whether it is truly genuine or not is insignificant. What counts is that these people awaken the little Sartrean being within us, that admires the ability of someone to show them being-for-themself in the face of an empty existence, where it feels much safer to hide away in an unconscious normalcy. Pop culture and the media rake in millions of dollars every year because they feed the people what they want to see: other human beings refusing to be a blasé being-in-itself: which is an entity that is of constant, unchanging nature and is not consciousness of itself (what kids today affectionately refer to as the state of being “basic”), and instead, taking up the quest of a being-for-itself, which entails being conscious of ones own consciousness, and taking full advantage of the daunting truth that existence is nothingness and they are condemned to be free. 

Given this understanding of existence, all human beings begin equally with nothing. When we look at the people whom our society values today, we can observe a general trend of individuals who have made something of their own existence in a noticeably distinctive and  individually created way. However the extent to which their contribution is authentic and/or meaningful cannot be said to be the same for all famous people, and there is a reason why John Lennon and Kim Kardashian don’t exactly fit in the same category under the umbrella term “icon”. Nevertheless, even with Ms. Kardashian we can observe how she creates her own being in the world, which we recognize through her unique assets… as in her hit reality TV show!

In all seriousness, the more you think of the analogy between Sartre and pop culture, the more it starts to actually make sense that we bother to have any interest in the material being produced by the entertainment industry today. While I am most definitely not saying that this means today’s pop culture shouldn’t be met with a critical eye (the topic of value is a whole other discussion), at least Sartre helps us understand why bizarrely unique cultural phenomenons get the attention that they do.

In order to help further illustrate my point, I am enlisting the help of Drake, who managed to “break the internet” with the following music video for his hit song Hotline Bling:

Drake shows us how he asserts his true essence in front of the world by combining a few incomprehensible outfits, a mystical futuristic void-like backdrop, and dance moves like this:

And these....

And of course...

 And while my first reaction is: "where did he learn those alien dance moves and what is with that turtleneck sweater," next thing I know the video is getting tens of millions of hits on YouTube, and that puffy red jacket reportedly sold out everywhere instantly. Who knew?

Well, Sartre would translate this apparent weirdness into a perfectly comprehensible explanation: that this is an exhibition of Drake exercising his only way of existing, namely, through creation. In a world full of pop music that all sounds the same, and hip hop videos that all seem to take place in the same club, Drake's break from mainstream music and visuals is a response to the mindless monotony that has numbed pop culture.

Naturally, the response to this is that the public gets a welcomed jolt out of a numbness from seeing the same repeated trends. And thanks to the World Wide Web, people all around the world can respond to this act of Drake being-for-himself with admiration... 

Exhibit A: Internet trolls/cat lovers inspired into action by Drake's demonstration of free will:

Exhibit B: Donald Trump on Saturday Night Live trying and failing to re-create an iconic moment (N.B. in this scenario, Donald reduces himself to a being-in-itself through the mundane act of imitation):

 Exhibit C: Two icons collide to remind us of the importance of creating our own existence:

While I hope this discourse will help you to cope with the fact that you love to hate the ever-evolving, being-for-itself, that is Justin Bieber, my ultimate intention in choosing this particular topic was to perhaps broaden your perspectives on the use of Existentialist philosophy in today’s modern society to a place where it hasn’t gone before. So the next time the internet freaks out about a rapper’s music video that appears to be emulating the dance moves of your grandfather, just remember that everyone is secretly harbouring an admiration for his ability to assert his wild freedom to the world (and the cult following that succeeds such iconic moments can be recognized as a further example of the unaware, being-in-itself of the masses). But just remember kids, while all is fun and flashy in pop culture: all icons begin equally as nothing, but not all icons create themselves equal.

Cheers, to Existentialism 2015!