-Aditi Raj

“covid is an existential crisis that comes from an awareness of your own freedom” says Dr Sarb Johal

The word existential means feelings of unease about meaning, choices and freedom in one’s life. Whatever you call it, the main motive is the same: the idea of our life being meaningless because it is continuously facing restrictions, and with a conclusion that at the end our life will end with death. In this article we will discuss the feeling of existential crisis in an individual mind has a positive or a negative impact.

The ideation sounds quite bleak, but if we do think about it it’s not an uncommon experience. It’s just we barely have a conversation over such topic, and when we experience this in our own, we think we’re alone in this experience, so we end up choosing to hide it. Forging ahead to the article I would like to attach few words of fiction written by me during the beginning of this pandemic.

Last sleepless night(which is quite frequent nowadays),some astonishing thoughts suddenly appeared in my mind. As I had an integrated night, soon that thoughts changed into overthinking. I had a thought that how everything is so interim in our life. Last month we were so engrossed in our daily schedule and here we are in complete isolation where we don’t even know how to spend our day. Have we ever thought that a virus can entirely transform our way of living? Have we ever thought that sitting ideally will be subtitled as “serving the tribe”? One moment we were so busy with everything and the second moment everything has stopped. Things that were decisive for us now seem worthless. Lying on my bed, my brain bursted with the thought that how temporary everything is. The body is mortal and anything can happen anytime. And the most important thing is our lives and the people we love.

An existential crisis often occurs after major life events, such as one’s career or their job, death of their close one’s, diagnosis of a life-threatening illness or experiencing a trauma. For existentialists, an existential crisis is considered to be a journey, a necessary experience and a complex phenomenon. It comes from awareness of your own freedom and realization of how our life will end up one day. Experiencing an existential crisis can also be positive as it brings out the self guidance and also the question where you realize the purpose of life and finding directions.

Around the world, many have found that the covid-19 crisis has helped them realize what is truly important in their lives. The basics :like health, stable relationships with family and closed one and a comfortable and safe place called home.

And in the conclusion, the process of learning to live with this existential anxiety should possibly be framed as adaption rather than anxiety. Adaption means adjusting yourself according to the condition, rather than moving yourself to some imaginary point which may never happen.