Living Where Your Feet Are: An Existential Antidote to Cultural Chaos
We live in a moment where it feels almost impossible to escape the noise. The news cycle churns relentlessly, social media amplifies every insult and outrage, and the conflicts of the nation seep into our daily conversations. Many people respond by lashing out—anger becomes a default mode, despair a steady undercurrent. Even for those who don’t raise their voices online, the constant exposure leaves a mark: a sense of helplessness, fatigue, and disconnection from what is most immediate and real in their own lives.
Existential psychology reminds us that this atmosphere is not new in its essence, even if its volume feels unprecedented. Anxiety, absurdity, and despair are part of the human condition. Kierkegaard warned that despair is the sickness unto death, Sartre argued that we are condemned to be free, and Heidegger described how easy it is to lose ourselves in “the they”—absorbed in the chatter and dictates of the crowd. What these thinkers share is the insistence that while the world will always bring uncertainty and conflict, we remain responsible for how we meet it.
The challenge, then, is not to find a quieter world but to live with steadiness in a noisy one. To resist being carried away by abstractions and instead return to the ground beneath us—our own choices, relationships, and daily actions. To live where our feet are.
This is not escapism. It is not a call to ignore injustice or pretend that cultural fracture does not exist. It is, instead, a call to remember that our freedom and our meaning are built in the immediacy of daily life: in what we create, how we connect, and the ways we take responsibility for our own existence.
The Existential Landscape of Our Time
The turmoil of our current age often feels singular, as though no generation has ever faced such noise or division. Yet from an existential perspective, the conditions we face are less novel than they appear. What is unique is the form, not the essence. Anxiety, despair, and absurdity have always pressed against human life. What changes is the medium: today, instead of whispers in the marketplace or pamphlets passed through a crowd, we are saturated by screens that deliver conflict on demand, twenty-four hours a day.
Kierkegaard described despair as the deep unease that comes from being unable to align ourselves with our possibilities. For him, despair was not simply sadness or discouragement but a fundamental estrangement from what it means to live authentically. This estrangement often shows up when we hand over our attention to forces outside of us, becoming absorbed in the judgments, fears, and dictates of others. In our own time, the endless scroll of social media and the barrage of news serve this function. They entice us into despair by convincing us that we are powerless in the face of constant upheaval.
Heidegger used a different language but captured a similar truth. He spoke of “falling into the they,” losing ourselves in the anonymous voice of collective chatter. For him, authentic living requires a return to what he called “being-in-the-world,” a groundedness that begins with our immediate context—our relationships, our daily practices, our capacity to choose. The digital environment, with its constant feed of outrage, is perhaps the most vivid example of what it means to be pulled away from authentic being and consumed by the noise of “the they.”
Psychologically, this has profound consequences. Research shows that when people feel powerless, they often resort to anger as a way of asserting control, or they withdraw entirely, sinking into passivity. Both responses reinforce the sense of being trapped. A society marked by lashing out and shutting down is one that has forgotten how to live where its feet are.
From an existential perspective, awareness of this condition is the first step. To name the despair, to recognize the absorption into noise, is already a move toward freedom. What follows is the question that will guide the rest of this essay: once we see the terrain for what it is, how do we respond in ways that affirm our agency and restore meaning to our days?
The Freedom of Choice and Responsibility
Viktor Frankl, reflecting on his survival in Nazi concentration camps, wrote that everything can be taken from a person except the final freedom: to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances. This insight has become one of the most enduring contributions of existential psychology. The circumstances of our lives may narrow our options, and at times the world may close in on us with crushing force, but the capacity to respond, however limited, remains intact.
From a psychological perspective, this freedom is tied to what researchers call locus of control. A person with an external locus tends to believe that life is governed by forces beyond their reach, while someone with an internal locus recognizes the weight of circumstance but also accepts responsibility for how they respond. Existential thinkers align closely with the internal locus: they remind us that the defining feature of being human is not the conditions we face but the stance we take toward them.
This is why outrage scrolling and passive consumption drain us so profoundly. They tempt us into relinquishing our freedom, convincing us that our only role is to witness what others decide and despair at how little say we have. Each headline, each argument, each rhetorical firestorm tells us that we are small and helpless. Yet the very act of turning away, even briefly, toward something immediate and intentional is itself a declaration of freedom. To take a walk, to begin a project, to pick up the phone and call a friend—these are not small gestures. They are affirmations that one’s life is not wholly at the mercy of external forces.
During the early days of the pandemic, I learned this in a personal way. My industry was deemed essential, and so I went to work each day while others remained isolated. That structure provided me with stability. More than that, though, I had recently begun a new relationship. Much of my free time was spent talking, laughing, and imagining possibilities with someone who mattered to me. Without realizing it at the time, I was protecting myself from despair not through denial of what was happening in the wider world but by anchoring myself in a sphere where my choices still mattered. I was not compelled to watch every briefing, track every rising case number, or immerse myself in every grim prediction. My life was lived in the immediacy of work and relationship, and that immediacy carried me through.
The lesson is not that everyone should have the same circumstances, but that meaning and steadiness emerge from where we choose to place our attention and how we choose to act. In moments of fracture, freedom is not found in grand gestures but in the everyday willingness to reclaim responsibility for one’s existence.
Everyday Acts of Authentic Living
It is tempting to dismiss the small actions of daily life as trivial against the scale of national conflict or cultural fracture. Yet existential psychology insists that it is precisely through these ordinary acts that we live authentically. Sartre argued that existence is not defined by grand abstractions but by the choices we make, moment by moment. Each decision reveals our orientation toward freedom: either a retreat into passivity or an embrace of responsibility.
Consider something as simple as learning to cook a new cuisine. On the surface, it is merely a skill or diversion. But psychologically, it is a declaration of agency. It shifts the individual from consumer to creator, from passive absorber of noise to active participant in life. The kitchen becomes a site of authorship, a reminder that meaning is constructed, not received. The act resonates with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of flow—the deep absorption that arises when skill and challenge align. In cooking, as in many creative endeavors, time loosens its grip, and anxiety temporarily recedes.
Or take the choice to map out a new walking path. It is a small decision, but it embodies a larger truth: that new perspectives emerge when we alter our patterns. To walk differently is to see differently, to recognize that even familiar surroundings hold possibilities unexplored. In existential terms, it is a literal enactment of freedom—refusing to remain bound by repetition when other routes are available. The body’s movement through space reinforces the mind’s recognition that alternative paths exist in every dimension of life.
Community-based rituals serve a similar purpose. A weekly card game, a shared meal, or a recurring gathering may seem inconsequential compared to the torrent of national headlines. Yet psychologically, these rituals anchor us in relationship, which is one of the most protective factors against despair. Research consistently shows that social bonds buffer stress and reduce the risk of mental health decline. Existentially, these gatherings remind us that authenticity is not isolation but engagement—that meaning is co-created through the presence of others.
These actions are not distractions. They are practices of reclamation. Each one pulls life back from abstraction and into embodiment, creation, and connection. They counter the temptation to measure our worth by how much outrage we consume or how informed we appear about every conflict. Instead, they reaffirm that meaning is not found in the volume of information we absorb but in the intentionality of how we live.
In this sense, the seemingly small decisions are not small at all. They are existential acts—evidence that freedom is still possible, even in times when the world seems determined to convince us otherwise.
Living Where Your Feet Are
The image of feet on the ground carries more weight than it first appears. To live where your feet are is to resist the pull of abstraction, to return from the noise of the world into the immediacy of your own existence. Heidegger described authentic being as a return to presence, a willingness to dwell in one’s finite life rather than dissolve into the endless chatter of “the they.” Our feet remind us that we are here, not elsewhere. They anchor us to place and time, drawing us back from a thousand competing narratives to the singular fact of our own life.
Existential philosophy insists that this grounding is not easy. Sartre described freedom as a burden, because with it comes responsibility. To choose presence is to reject the false comfort of distraction and outrage. It requires courage to turn off the stream of news, to silence the hum of online conflict, and to invest instead in what is close, tangible, and real. The choice to live where your feet are is, in many ways, an act of defiance: it declares that life will not be outsourced to the abstractions of fear or hostility.
Psychologically, grounding carries profound effects. Attention is not infinite. What we feed grows, and what we starve withers. By directing attention toward embodied life—toward creating, connecting, and being present—we reinforce neural pathways of agency rather than helplessness. We quiet the hyperarousal that comes from constant exposure to conflict. We build resilience by restoring balance between what we take in and what we actively generate. In short, we strengthen the very capacities that cultural fracture seeks to erode.
Living where your feet are does not mean ignoring the world or refusing responsibility for its injustices. It means refusing to let the noise steal the ground beneath you. It is a discipline of presence, a daily decision to locate meaning in the immediate rather than in the abstract. To cook, to walk, to gather, to love—these are not retreats from reality but ways of reentering it authentically. They remind us that life, even in troubled times, is still ours to author.
Conclusion: The Hope of Grounded Existence
The world will not grow quiet simply because we wish it to. Conflict will continue, rhetoric will flare, and social media will amplify the very worst of human behavior. To wait for calm before choosing to live is to surrender our lives to forces we cannot control. Existential psychology reminds us that meaning is not granted by external stability but created in the choices we make each day.
To live where your feet are is to reclaim that responsibility. It is to recognize that while we cannot erase the fractures of a nation or silence the endless cycle of outrage, we can decide how we will respond. We can choose to cook, to walk, to gather, to create, to love. These are not distractions but deliberate refusals to hand over our existence to despair. They are practices of freedom, reminders that even in the face of absurdity, life remains ours to shape.
Hope, in this sense, is not a fragile optimism that things will inevitably improve. It is a steadier, more durable stance: the recognition that meaning can always be made, even in difficulty, and that freedom always survives in the immediacy of our choices. To stand where our feet are, to inhabit the present with courage and intention, is to live authentically.
The noise will continue. But so can we.