Existentialists believe that reason, science, and religion deny individuality by forming guidelines and rules for living.

Authenticity and individuality-A person must live as an individual and become his or her authentic self.

Responsibility-Existentialists believe that it is a person's sole responsibility to find the meaning in his or her own life, to make choices about his or her life, and to accept responsibility for the decisions he or she makes in trying to find meaning.

Many existentialists feel a sense of depression because they realize that no one can help make sense of their existence it is completely an individual quest.

Alienation-Existentialists feel as if they have no place in the world they feel like strangers in their own lives.

An existentialist does not believe in the explanations offered by religion, science, or society about the reasons for human existence. Once an existentialist realizes that the world is an absurd place, this causes anxiety. Existentialists, therefore, seek meaning in an absurd world, trying to define their place and the reason they are here.

Absurdity-Existentialists believe that life is absurd and has no meaning.

Existentialists unite under several common themes: Neither scientific thinking-including psychology-nor moral thinking can fully explain what it is to be human. Overall, existentialism is the search for the meaning of life what is it to exist as a unique person? Existentialists believe that the meaning of life is sought through individual choices, free will, and personal freedom. When he comes to accept the “gentle indifference of the world,” he finds peace with himself and with the society that persecutes him. For his crime, Meursault is deemed a threat to society and sentenced to death. He does not cry at his mother’s funeral, does not believe in God, and kills a man he barely knows without any discernible motive. Published in 1942, the novel tells the story of an emotionally detached, amoral young man named Meursault. The Stranger, Camus’s first novel, is both a brilliantly crafted story and an illustration of Camus’s absurdist world view. Existence seemed simply, to use Camus’s term, absurd. Faced with the horrors of Hitler’s Nazi regime and the unprecedented slaughter of the War, many could no longer accept that human existence had any purpose or discernible meaning.

The experience of World War II led many other intellectuals to similar conclusions. A major component of this philosophy was Camus’s assertion that life has no rational or redeeming meaning. While in wartime Paris, Camus developed his philosophy of the absurd.

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