Reflection On A Retirement Career

One doesn’t become an existentialist.  One is an existentialist and discovers that.  So it was for me 41 years ago when I took a class in existential literature, in high school no less, not knowing what existential literature was but knowing that it fit my class schedule.  My existential beliefs were solidified – more clearly perceived – a few years later when in college I took another course.  Yes, this was I, an existentialist.

Contrary to the popular notion of existentialists being morose, angst-driven, latte-sipping, French-phrase dropping intellectuals, true existentialists are people of resolve, passion, and action.  They recognize their limits and work to them and not beyond.  Existentialists know, based on Jean-Paul Sartre’s theories, that people are born as a blank slate, neither morally good nor evil, and that people are not controlled by outside forces.  We are or we become whom we choose to be, to paraphrase Alice Walker’s quote from The Temple of My Familiar.  We are in complete control of our destiny, our present and our future.  However, lest we allow the world or ourselves to dissolve into nihilistic, Epicurean self-indulgence, existentialists also propose that we make our choices acting for all mankind, again paraphrasing, this time Albert Camus, whose translator could not find a gender-neutral term.

So blithely, cheerfully, and even smugly, I lived my life for the next several decades controlling my own destiny and acting as I would, generally, want others to act.  I dismissed Camus’s passively frustrating character in The Stranger as an aberration and anomaly, though I never forgot him or the premise of the novel, which was another tenet of existentialism that I conveniently ignored.  Oddly, this final notion of existentialism struck me at age 59 while being engaged in the real estate business.

Existentialists also recognize that though they may in command of their own destiny and though they are not controlled by outside forces, the reality is that we have no control of those outside forces.  Therefore, we can become frustrated or angry; we can battle fruitlessly; we may even try to manipulate those outside forces.  All those reactions are distinctly un-existential.  The true existentialist, hence the one so often misrepresented as a disenchanted, disengaged denizen of shady, underground coffee shops, does not battle unbeatable forces.  The true existentialist accepts “defeat.”

How did this realization come to me through the real estate business, a venture not prone to philosophical meanderings of the mind?  I had closed several transactions, I was sitting on several listings going nowhere, and new customers were not beating the path to my door or website.  I had nothing to do; my destiny was controlled by the outside force of nothing happening.  I did try to nudge the market, a substantially large undertaking.  I did try to convince people who weren’t interested to come to me and buy or sell.  I networked.  Nothing happened.  One wintry cold morning as I reflected on this state of affairs, I had my next (and hopefully final) existential epiphany.  The true existentialist does not battle uncontrollable outside forces, but accepts that these forces cannot be defeated; the true existentialist does not waste energy or passion fighting these forces.  I completely enjoyed this conclusive revelation and marveled that it could have emerged from such an unlikely place as the real estate sales profession.