Sartre said you're not born with a purpose — you have to invent one

Jean-Paul Sartre argued that unlike a manufactured tool, designed for a purpose before it's built, a human being simply exists first, with no built-in essence or nature dictating what they must become. We are, he wrote, 'condemned to be free': radically responsible for defining our own values and identity through the choices we actually make. For Sartre, there's no fixed human nature and no excuse to hand that responsibility away.

— Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism — 1946 lecture, published 1946

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