You're standing at a crossroads, but there's no signpost. No divine voice whispers which path leads to the good life. No cosmic law etched into the universe tells you what matters. This isn't a failure of navigation—it's the fundamental condition of human existence.

The existentialist tradition confronts us with an uncomfortable truth: values don't exist as features of the world waiting to be discovered. There's no moral bedrock beneath our feet, no eternal truths hanging in the sky. The universe is silent on questions of meaning. Yet we must choose. We must commit. We must live as though our choices matter—because they do, precisely because nothing else determines them for us.

This creates what Sartre called the 'anguish' of freedom. We cannot escape into ready-made answers, yet we cannot live without values. The question isn't whether we'll create values—we inevitably will—but whether we'll do so honestly, with full awareness of what we're doing.

For most of human history, people inherited their values. Religion provided them. Tradition handed them down. Social roles prescribed them. You knew what a good father, citizen, or believer looked like because the answer came pre-packaged. This wasn't naivety—it was a genuine experience of values as given, as facts about the world as solid as stones.

What existentialists call 'the death of God' isn't primarily about atheism. It's about recognizing that even if God exists, values don't simply flow from divine command. We still choose to follow those commands. We still decide which interpretation of tradition to embrace. The buck stops with us. There's no authority we can defer to that isn't itself a choice to defer.

This recognition strips away comfortable illusions. The person who says 'I'm just following my religion' or 'I'm honoring my culture' is still choosing that religion, that culture, that interpretation. They're authoring their values while pretending to read them from a script. The script is blank—we're writing on it with every decision.

Facing this blankness honestly is terrifying. Without given values, we might be tempted toward nihilism: nothing matters, so why care? But nihilism is itself a chosen stance, a decision to respond to valuelessness with withdrawal. The absence of given values doesn't eliminate value—it reveals that value has always been our creation, our project, our responsibility.

Takeaway

Values you treat as discovered were always chosen—recognizing this doesn't diminish them but reveals you as their true author, with all the responsibility that entails.

Here's the paradox that gives existentialism its weight: we remain fully responsible for our values even though nothing grounds them. There's no cosmic scorekeeper, no objective measure against which our choices will be judged correct or incorrect. Yet we cannot escape accountability for what we value and how we live.

This responsibility extends in every direction. We're responsible for adopting our values—no one forced us. We're responsible for maintaining them through ongoing commitment. We're responsible for the consequences they produce in our lives and others'. And we're responsible for abandoning or revising them. At every moment, we choose.

The temptation of 'bad faith' becomes acute here. Bad faith is the strategy of fleeing from freedom by pretending we had no choice. 'Anyone would have done the same.' 'My upbringing made me this way.' 'I was just being practical.' These excuses try to locate the source of our values outside ourselves, to transform our choices into necessities that happened to us.

But responsibility without foundation also brings a strange liberation. If no external standard can validate our values, neither can any external standard condemn them as ultimately wrong. We're answerable to ourselves, to those we affect, to the commitments we've made—but not to some abstract tribunal of objective morality. Our values don't need cosmic permission to be real.

Takeaway

You cannot escape responsibility for your values by pointing to their groundlessness—the absence of foundation makes you more responsible, not less, because nothing else can bear the weight of your choices.

If values are created rather than discovered, how do we create ones worth having? The answer lies not in finding better foundations—there are none—but in the quality of our commitment. A value held with clear-eyed awareness of its human origin can be more genuine than one believed to come from God but held inauthentically.

Authentic value-creation begins with acknowledging the abyss. Don't pretend your values rest on something firmer than your commitment to them. This acknowledgment doesn't weaken your values—it purifies them. You're not defending borrowed convictions; you're standing behind your own choices.

Next comes serious engagement. Precisely because values are our creation, we shouldn't create them carelessly. The existentialist doesn't say 'anything goes.' They say: since everything depends on you, choose as someone who knows that everything depends on them. Your values define who you are and what kind of world you're building.

Finally, live your values into existence through action. Values aren't private mental states—they're patterns of commitment expressed in how you spend your time, what you sacrifice, what you refuse to compromise. A value you never act on isn't really yours. The proof of creation is in the living. This is what Sartre meant by saying existence precedes essence: you become what you do, and your values become real through your sustained embodiment of them.

Takeaway

Create values not by finding firmer foundations but by committing more honestly—know what you're doing, take it seriously, and prove your values real through how you actually live.

We stand where every human has always stood: in a universe that doesn't tell us what to value, forced to choose anyway. The difference is awareness. We can no longer hide behind the fiction of discovered values without engaging in bad faith.

This is not a tragedy but an invitation. The weight of creating our own values is also the dignity of self-authorship. We're not executing a predetermined script—we're writing the play as we perform it, responsible for every word.

The question isn't whether you'll create values. You're doing it right now, with every commitment and refusal. The question is whether you'll do it honestly, with full ownership of what you're about.