Condemned to Be Free
Sartre has a phrase that sounds like a contradiction: we are condemned to be free. Condemned, like a sentence, a punishment. Why would freedom be a punishment? Because, he says, we didn’t choose to exist, and yet once we’re here every single thing we do is a choice we’re on the hook for, with no excuse available. No human nature handed down to blame, no script, no author upstairs who decided in advance what we’d be. We’re thrown into existence and then forced to invent ourselves, with the bill for every choice landing straight on us.
People hear radical freedom and think it sounds liberating, fun even. Sartre knew it was mostly terrifying, and that most of us spend our lives running from it. We want to be free in the abstract and unfree in the particular. We want options, but we want someone else holding the receipt for which one we took.
Watch it play out in a career. The most common move I see, in me and everyone, is to outsource the authorship. The market decided. The roadmap said. My manager set the priorities. This is just what people in my role do. Each one is true and each one is, in Sartre’s sense, a small lie, because you chose to be in the market, on the roadmap, under the manager, in the role. The constraints are real, but you picked the cage and you renew the lease every morning. Pretending the cage chose you is the comfortable fiction that lets you off the hook.
Sartre won’t let you off. His doctrine is almost cruel in how it refuses excuses. You are nothing but the sum of your actions. Not your intentions, not your potential, not the great thing you’d have built under better conditions. Just what you actually did. The novel you meant to write is not a novel. The company you’d have started in a fairer world is not a company. No credit for the unbuilt. Existence precedes essence, you’re made entirely out of your acts, and the acts you skipped are simply not part of you.
Sounds harsh, and it’s the most motivating idea I know. Because the flip side of total responsibility is total authorship. If nothing was decided in advance, nothing is fixed. The role doesn’t own you. The pattern you’ve followed isn’t destiny. The four-month engine, the past abandonments, the credential you do or don’t have, none of it is an essence. It’s all just prior actions, and the next action is unwritten. You’re condemned to keep authoring, which means you’re never finished, which means the disappointing chapter is never the last one unless you put the pen down.
AI showed up offering convenience, and the deepest convenience it offers is the same old escape. The model decided, the system optimised, it wasn’t really me. Sartre would call that the purest bad faith yet. Handing your authorship to a machine so you never have to own the page. The freedom is still yours. You can always still choose. The machine generates options. Only you can take responsibility for one, and taking responsibility is the whole of what it means to be a person and not a process.
You didn’t ask to be here. But you’re the author now, no co-signer, nobody to blame.
Write something worth the sentence.
One of a series of essays. I’m Prajjwal Chittori. prajjwalchittori.com.