How to think like a man, if you don't already know.

The most influential book i've read is the French Philosopher Jean Paul Sartre's 'Existentialism is a Humanism' - simply because, for a direction-less undergraduate as i was at the time, it gave me something personally meaningful to think about and provided the foundation or setting for most of the subsequent ideas i've had regarding my own life. 

Sartre begins by comparing the idea of a God to a designer or architect who creates a definite purpose for humans, just as an inventor designs something (like a light bulb) from blueprints with a purpose in mind.  But if you reject the idea of a God then there is nothing to provide any predefined purpose in life. 

He says that each person is born as a tabula rasa (blank slate) who are defined during the course of their lives, not before-hand, in accordance with a predetermined 'human-nature'.  (By 'human nature' here Sartre means the religious idea of pre-existing structures of right and wrong actions or a pre-determined social purpose). In Sartre's own words for humans 'existence precedes essence'.

"Man first exists, encounters himself and emerges in the world, to be defined afterwards. Thus, there is no human nature, since there is no God to conceive it."

So then who determines what each man is and what he should do? Well, he does himself. Each man takes responsibility for who and what he is and is defined only by the sum of his actions, not what he intends to do or what his potential is.

"Man becomes nothing other than what is actually done, not what he will want to be."

Sartre finishes by concluding that man is left in a state of 'abandonment' in the absence of a higher meaning. Man is subjected to 'anguish' caused by having to create his own life as if it were a standard for all reality - because it will impact all around him - even though there is nothing to indicate if it is. His 'Despair' is the result of having nothing but himself to rely on.

"In the end [...] we must act without hope."

So: your life and who and what you are depends entirely on what you make of it yourself and shows itself only in the things you actually do. No one can 'show you the way' because there is no proper way.  Only you can choose.

This taught me one valuable lesson: that i was the highest authority that existed in my life, if not practically then at least in theory and that i was alone to determine it for myself.  Other ideas garnered from the likes of Descartes (and his treatment of the deep subjectivity of existence) made it more blatantly apparent to me that i was truely subjectively isolated and essentially 'in my own world'.  How I dealt with that and created an existence among a mass of other subjectively bound creatures has been the focus of my thoughts since.

(All excerpts are taken directly from Existentialisme est un Humanisme, Jean Paul Sartre, 1945.)