Kazimir Malevich, The Principle of Painting the Walls, 1920

From an existential perspective, then, we are first and foremost a verb-like being, and it is only subsequently that we may define ourselves as a noun-like thing: such as ‘an extrovert’ or ‘a therapist’. This is the meaning of the well-known Sartrean phrase: ‘Existence precedes essence’. In other words, human beings are not fixed selves, but a relationship towards their own being; or, as Kierkegaard puts it, ‘a relation that relates itself to itself’. For Heidegger, too, the essence of human existence is ‘self-interpretation’. As human beings, we are constantly making sense of ourselves and understanding who we are – even if this is not at a level of reflective self-awareness.

Mick Cooper, Existential Therapies

Mikhail Vrubel (1856–1910)
Girl with a Wreath (1898)
Earthenware w/ colored glazes
Private Collection

Jeux interdits, René Clément, 1952

Capitalism is obsessed with death. The unconscious fear of death is what spurs it on. The threat of death is what stirs its compulsion of accumulation and growth. This compulsion drives us towards not only ecological, but also mental catastrophe. The destructive compulsion to perform combines self-affirmation and self-destruction in one. We optimize ourselves to death. Relentless self-exploitation leads to mental collapse. Brutal competition ends in destruction. It produces an emotional coldness and indifference towards others as well as towards one’s own self.

— Byung-Chul Han, Capitalism and the Death Drive

In Youth, Beside the Lonely Sea (1924-25), director unknown

Amusement under late capitalism is the prolongation of work. It is sought after as an escape from the mechanized work process, and to recruit strength in order to be able to cope with it again. But at the same time mechanization has such power over a man’s leisure and happiness, and so profoundly determines the manufacture of amusement goods, that his experiences are inevitably after-images of the work process itself.

— Adorno & Horkheimer, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception”, Dialectic of Enlightenment