Living With Existential Questions

There are experiences within life that feel as if you've suddenly found yourself in a new and yet strangely familiar place. The feeling is paradoxical — like visiting a park you've known for years and noticing that nothing seems to be in its right place. This experience often points toward a deep shift in awareness: a sense that how you have been living, and how others around you seem to live, feels somehow off — not in a way you can easily name, but in a way that is deeply felt within your being.

This may push you toward questions that resist easy answers, yet circle the same looping themes: identity, choice, purpose, and perhaps most importantly — how do I live the rest of my days fully awake and aware of what is in front of me?

These are existential questions — and for some, the experience of being confronted by them can feel like an existential crisis. Though that phrase often implies something dramatic, the reality is usually quieter and more pervasive: a gradual shift in how life itself is being encountered, rather than a single moment of collapse.

These are the kinds of questions and experiences that anchor my practice as a therapist in Eugene, Oregon. As an existential–humanistic therapist, I work with clients to meet the lived encounters, sensations, and questions that most of us spend our lives circling around but rarely face directly.

Part One: When the Ground Shifts

We each trace a path through life. It begins well before we are thrown into this world and extends far beyond the moment we leave it. When we start to notice this path with genuine awareness and curiosity, it can cause reality itself to shift — leaving us feeling far less stable than we once did.

This loss of stability can feel directionless, or a sense that making choices that feel genuinely meaningful is suddenly out of reach. You might notice that the structures and systems that once held life together no longer seem to fit in the way they once did. These experiences can feel like cracks appearing in reality: places where you begin to sense that the future, and even the present, is far less legible than it once was. And yet within this same experience, reality can feel strangely full — suddenly open, uncertain, and alive with possibility.

What makes this so difficult to navigate is that it resists being known in the usual way. The impulse is to map the situation, to locate the problem and fix it — and yet the more we try to resolve it through our usual means, the further it recedes from us. This shifting ground is not a problem to be solved in the usual way. It represents something more fundamental: a shift in how we understand the world itself, and how we encounter our being at its most basic and existential level.

There is also something particular to name about our current moment in time. We are perpetually surrounded by image in a way unimaginable to our ancestors. You can pick up your phone and encounter the entire suffering of the world within seconds. The real-time feed of a war amongst people you will never meet can unfold endlessly, if you choose to watch.

And at the same time, we are all aware that the reality we encounter through these black mirrors is edited, filtered, and curated — optimized for attention rather than truth. This leaves us fragmented, and asked to hold the complexity of the entire world within our own individual awareness. The tension this creates is profound. It is no surprise that anxiety has become perhaps the most common experience of our age. How do we hold a hyperconnected world mediated by image rather than direct experience? How do we even know what is truly real?

All of this — the loss of stable ground, the weight of a rapidly shifting world, the disorientation of living inside image — pushes and pulls on us. We are left with language that diagnoses the experience: anxiety, depression, relationship conflict. These descriptions are not wrong. But they are incomplete. They name what is visible at the surface without touching what lies beneath.

What many of us sense is that beneath all of these experiences are timeless questions, ones as old as humanity itself.

Part Two: The Path Less Traveled

As a culture, we tend to understand our suffering as a personal problem, best approached through a psychological lens. This is part of why diagnostic frameworks feel so appealing — they reduce the discomfort of ambiguity into something that can be mapped, named, and treated. And for many people, this works — the naming brings relief, and the treatment plan provides direction. But for some of us, the questions that surface don't fit inside that frame. They aren't problems with solutions. They are encounters that ask something different of us entirely.

The existential questions I am speaking about resist the problem-solving frame. This is because at their root, they are not problems to be solved. They are encounters to be had.

When you find yourself in a moment of stillness asking who am I, in a way that feels truly real? or why does it feel so difficult to know what I actually want? — these questions are not symptoms. They are invitations. They point toward something that has always been present but largely hidden, and they mark the beginning of a path that can lead toward genuine self-discovery.

When we slow down and come more directly into contact with what is present within our awareness, rather than attempting to solve what is in front of us, the relationship to the experience itself begins to change. This shift is not resolution in a conventional sense — it is an encounter with a different relationship to uncertainty and to being itself. The diagnostic frame has no language for this. But existential therapy is built around it.

Part Three: An Open Door

Beneath the diagnostic labels — anxiety, depression, relationship conflict — there is a fundamentally different way to understand what is happening.

The truth of our existential condition is that it rarely arrives as a single isolated experience. What we notice in one area of life tends to connect to others — a web of interrelated encounters that, when followed, lead toward the deeper questions we all must face: how we make meaning, how we are simultaneously free and yet constrained by the reality we inhabit, and what kind of life we actually want to create.

Ultimately, all of these experiences point toward the question beneath all questions: how do we wish to live in a life that one day will end?

In this sense, I understand the core questions of existence to be like a doorway — a threshold we can choose to step through, to find out what we can encounter on the other side.

As we walk through that door, we step into the unknown. And yet at the same time, we come into contact with something more solid than what we left behind — not certainty, but something earned. A place to stand that does not require everything to be resolved before we take the next step.

The existential–humanistic approach I practice as a therapist is built for exactly this terrain. It does not begin by reducing your experience to a diagnostic category. It begins by taking your experience seriously — meeting it where it is, and walking alongside you to see where the path leads.

Through this kind of presence, awareness deepens and patterns become more visible. From that clarity, a different way of living begins to take shape — not as a solution, but as something closer to a path. One that holds the deeper questions of your existence without needing to resolve them before you move forward.

Existential Therapy in Eugene, Oregon

If the questions on this page feel familiar or you find yourself wanting to know more you're welcome to reach out. I offer therapy that works with existential questions in Eugene, Oregon for both individuals and couples.

You may also want to explore life transitions & change, choice & direction, or learn more about who I work with and my approach through existential–humanistic therapy.