Realism and Resilience: An Inquiry Into the Helpfulness of Adopting an Existential Outlook

Introduction

Resilience is conceptualized as a capacity to bounce back from disappointments and misfortune, or more broadly to cope with life’s difficulties, and there has been considerable interest in identifying and understanding the factors which support or enable that capacity. Horn, Charney, and Feder (2016), for instance, review “recent findings regarding the genetic, epigenetic, developmental, psychosocial, and neurochemical factors as well as neural circuits and molecular pathways that underlie the development of resilience” (p. 119); and Howe, Smajdor, and Stöckl (2012) have drawn attention to social rather than physical factors and report that “resilience can be developed and determined by factors that act at the social as well as the individual level, and that the environment in which an individual must survive may support or undermine his or her personal resilience” (p. 350).

In this article, although we certainly acknowledge the role that biological and social factors can play in the development of resilience, we focus instead on the role that sense making can play at the individual level. Previous research has already highlighted the relevance of a form of sense making to resilience: “cognitive reappraisal.” Horn et al. (2016) report that “cognitive reappraisal, an emotion regulation strategy involving the ability to monitor negative thoughts and replace them with more positive ones, is often employed by resilient individuals” (p. 121). Our interest extends beyond the sense making involved in replacing negative thoughts with more positive ones to how some people are able to make sense of life events, such as the death of a much-loved parent, that are so significant they have the potential to cast a permanently negative shadow over how that person feels and thinks about their life.

Religious and spiritual beliefs immediately suggest themselves as a sense making resource from which individuals can cope with powerfully negative life events. The potential helpfulness of beliefs such as “everything happens for a reason” or “the Lord is my shepherd … though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death … Thou art with me” (psalm 23. 21st Century King James Version) seems self-evident. Indeed, Womble, Labbe, and Cochran (2013) report that a

review of the research on health and spirituality suggests that people who rate themselves higher on spirituality also tend to have better health, less illness, better treatment response, and lower mortality rates than people who rate themselves lower on spirituality. (p. 707)

For many people, however, embracing religious or spiritual beliefs is not an option, which brings us to the question that is at the centre of our inquiry: What outlook could provide a way of appraising setbacks and even tragedies which is supportive of resilience, for those people who are not religious or spiritual? By “outlook” we mean a person’s general way of thinking about life, which can vary from optimistic to pessimistic and also from realistic to unrealistic; and by “realistic” we mean accepting things as they are rather than believing in what lacks supporting evidence but is nevertheless consoling. We contend that an Existential outlook aligns with realism because most thinkers categorized as Existentialists have either explicitly rejected religion or have not included any religious beliefs in their accounts of human reality—with the notable exceptions of Kierkegaard (2013) and Jaspers (1971).

Proposing that a philosophical outlook can have practical value is certainly not new. Stoicism, for instance, which emerged in pre-Christian Greece, “is meant to aid actual people in living their lives to the fullest possible extent” (Pigliucci, 2017, p. 139). Admittedly, however, those philosophers who have most often been labeled as Existentialists, such as Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Sartre, have not claimed that they were seeking to provide helpful guidance on how to cope with the challenges of life. Nor does an Existential outlook usually include the notion that something greater is guiding us through life; instead, human life is something we are “thrown” into.

Rather than providing guidance, Existentialism confronts each individual with the responsibility to decide how to live without the help of a supernatural being to guide or care for them. To think otherwise is to deceive ourselves and live, as Sartre (2003) would put it, in bad faith. We fully detail what we consider to be an “Existential outlook” later, but at this point we can briefly describe it as a belief set which emphasizes the conventional and groundless nature of social norms, the importance of authentically facing up to that groundlessness, our unavoidable mortality, the lack of objective purpose or meaning in life, and the anxieties and responsibilities which follow from experiencing that lack.

Given those emphases, it may seem counter intuitive to propose that an Existential outlook could support resilience and indeed, some authors have characterized Existentialism as a philosophy that removes hope and meaning from the world, and as an “expression of anguish and narcissism” (Flynn, 2012, p. 249). Such criticisms imply that having an Existential outlook is more likely to undermine than bolster resilience, particularly in light of research which shows that “therapeutic options for adults with PTSD aim to enhance psychosocial factors commonly observed in resilient individuals, including higher social support, emotion regulation, positive affect, physical exercise, meaning-making, and purpose in life” (Horn et al., 2016, p. 125).

How could an Existential outlook, which emphasizes the importance of rejecting comforting illusions and focusing instead on the inevitability of death, assist someone to replace negative thoughts with positive ones? Howe et al. (2012) note that resilient individuals are able to “learn from and find meaning in what might otherwise be significant or overwhelming psychological threats” (p. 351). Again, given that an Existential outlook emphasizes the ultimate meaninglessness of human life, how could thinking in that way assist people to “find meaning in what might otherwise be significant or overwhelming psychological threats”?

By acknowledging the reasons to doubt that an Existential outlook could be used by people in ways that help them to cope with setbacks and tragedies, we have shown that there is a need to provide examples that demonstrate how some individuals have in fact been able to benefit from using an Existential outlook to inform their thinking about life and its many vicissitudes. Before detailing the methodology we employed to arrive at those examples, however, we first need to provide a fuller account of what we mean by an “Existential outlook” and why the implications of that outlook for resilience are unclear, because without that account we will not be able to draw attention to the most pertinent and revealing features of our interview data. We also recognize that clearly explaining the nature of an Existential outlook is central to demonstrating that our research meets the requirements of construct validity for a qualitative inquiry.

An existential outlook

In this article, we are referring to “an” Existential outlook rather “the” Existential outlook for three reasons. Firstly, because we did not want to set restrictive limits on what can count as an Existential outlook before conducting our interviews—we wanted instead to keep an open mind about the various ways in which non-philosophers might develop and apply an outlook which is similar but not identical to the tenets of Existential philosophy. The value of that decision was confirmed when our analysis of interview data revealed an unexpected interplay between what we categorized as Existential tenets and the identity concerns of our participants. Our second reason is that there is no single, authoritative version of Existentialism; there are instead, versions which differ across individual philosophers. So although in this section of the article, for reasons of brevity, we characterize an Existential outlook by discussing key tenets in the work of Martin Heidegger, we do not want to claim that those tenets constitute all and only what is involved in adopting an Existential outlook.

Thirdly, the conceptual depth of Heidegger’s philosophy is not something we expect to find in the thinking of non-philosophers, as will quickly become apparent in the following account of his views. Nevertheless, we do expect to find from our data gathering and analysis that some non-philosophers think in ways that can be shown to align with or to reflect the essence of Heideggerian tenets enough for us to identify those views as an Existential outlook, but not as an Existential philosophy.

To present Heidegger’s tenets, we will not discuss his phenomenology but instead focus upon his accounts of three key and inescapable features of being human and of conducting our lives. Firstly, our everyday being-in-the-world (Dasein); secondly, our experiences of anxiety and not-being-at-home (Unheimlichkeit); and thirdly, authentic temporalizing as a way of being in the world in which death is of such primary importance that it is not just particular moments that matter to us, but the totality of our moments: what they add up to.

Heidegger says that Dasein is that being for whom its own existence, and how it should exist, is an issue—and taking over an interpretation of how to be, at an everyday level, from its community, is necessary to its being: “Its ownmost being is such that it has an understanding of that being, and already maintains itself in each case in a certain interpretedness of its being” (Heidegger, 1962, p. 36). Heidegger (1962) explains his position by saying “that kind of being towards which Dasein can comport itself in one way or another, and always does comport itself somehow, we call ‘existence’” (p. 32). For Heidegger then, the term “existence” does not simply refer to what is “real.” Trees and tables are real, but only self-interpreting beings exist.

The existential problem that people face is that the acceptable and accepted, socially inscribed interpretations of what and who we are—however, comforting they may be at the level of everyday existence—do not always meet our non-everyday need to answer the existential questions of life, and owning up to that reality produces anxiety: existential anxiety. Being-in-becoming is a feature of human existence that everyday social life tends to cover over, but ontological incompleteness remains with us as something that can be noticed and taken up rather than denied or ignored, and this is a situation that is more likely to come to the fore when we are called out of our everyday dwelling in the taken-for-granted world of social convention, by the anxiety that unsettles us in episodes of unheimlichkeit—experiences of not-being-at-home.

In a general sense, the settled, everyday possibilities which serve to guide us during those times when we feel that life and work are going as they should, can fall short of our needs when we encounter disagreement, failure, stress, and the doubts and questions induced by crisis. At such times, we recognize that our usual sense of what it is to be human is no more than an interpretation which lacks an essential ground. We recognize what we are really doing when we play at being essentially a manager or a lecturer or a waiter.

Heidegger has argued that it is the experience of anxiety which reveals our fundamental unsettledness, and the covered-over groundlessness of our social practices—their being as interpretation—and the openness of choice which is therefore available to us. For the Heidegger of Being and Time, anxiety results from the realization that our existence is “dependent upon a public system of significances that it did not produce” (Dreyfus, 1994, p. 177). When this realization occurs, Dasein recognizes its fundamental not-being-at-homeness: “In anxiety one feels “unsettled.” Thus, this realization is also a dreadful disturbance of our confidence in the importance of what we are doing in our lives.

Heidegger (1962) declares that when existential anxiety arises, “the involvement-whole of the available and the occurrent discovered within-the-world is, as such, of no consequence; it collapses into itself; the world has the character of completely lacking significance” (p. 231). When we experience Unheimlichkeit therefore, we recognize that we “cannot have a meaningful life simply by taking over and acting upon the concerns provided by society” (Dreyfus, 1994, p. 304). A meaningful life requires that we somehow personally appropriate—that we come to own—one of the possibilities for living that are provided by our society. Existential anxiety then shakes us out of the hold that social games can have on our sense of what matters.

As beings-in-becoming, we can take—or hide from—responsibility for authoring our lives in terms that define what and who we are. Heidegger (1962) uses the terms “authentic” and “inauthentic” to distinguish between taking responsibility and avoiding it.

We have defined the idea of existence as … an understanding ability to be, for which its own being is an issue. But this ability to be, as one which is in each case mine, is free either for authenticity or for inauthenticity or for a mode in which neither of these has been differentiated. (p. 275)

The disowned or inauthentic mode of being is one in which we passively accept the social role that we grew up thinking that we were “destined” for. Authenticity, as characterized by Heidegger, means seeing one’s life and one’s situation differently—in particular, authenticity is constituted by a gestalt switch in perspective (what Heidegger calls Augenblick: the glance of an eye) which affects one’s future actions as well as the interpretations of one’s past. At the heart of this gestalt switch, or refiguration, is the recognition that the commitments one has made to any particular lifestyle are based upon nothing other than the community-wide interpretations of how to be human; and in the equally unsettling recognition that our stories end in death.

Given that recognition, Heidegger (1962) maintains that we are authentic when we remain open to changes in circumstances and open to changes in commitments. Rather than await our death, we are authentic when we recognize its inevitability and forerun our death: “Forerunning discloses to existence that its uttermost possibility lies in giving itself up, and thus it shatters all one’s tenaciousness to whatever existence one has reached” (p. 308). To “forerun” seems to mean “to bear in mind” or “to live in accordance with the implications of” one’s end.

A consequence of Augenblick, then, is that confronting the omnipresent possibility of death forces Dasein to acknowledge that what matters to it about its existence is not just the specific moments that make it up, but the totality of those moments. When the totality of our moments matter, at every moment, then we are living in a different manner: not in time but as time. Heidegger calls this the authentic mode of temporalizing.

Clearly then, Heidegger paints a very sobering picture of the reality that we all have to deal with as persons, and the implications of that picture for coping with setbacks and tragedies are not immediately obvious. As we stated in the first section of this article, an Existential outlook can be roughly summarized as a belief set which emphasizes the conventional and in that sense groundless nature of social norms, the importance of authentically facing up to that groundlessness, the unavoidable mortality of all persons, the lack of objective purpose or meaning in life, and the anxieties and responsibilities which follow from experiencing that lack.

If an individual does develop an Existential outlook through the impact of life events and reflecting upon the meaning of those events, what will he or she conclude about how to respond to life’s difficulties? At the heart of our inquiry is uncertainty about whether thinking in ways that approximate an Existential outlook disheartens people and undermines resilience, or actually supports and contributes to resilience—and if a contribution does occur, how does that happen?

Methodology

Our methodology was designed for our purpose, so we pause briefly here to state that our purpose was not to build or test theory. Instead, our purpose was to conduct an inquiry that addresses the following question: What outlook could provide a way of appraising setbacks and even tragedies which is supportive of resilience, for those people who are not religious or spiritual?

This article is therefore partly empirical and partly philosophical. Unlike most philosophical papers we do not rely solely on argument. Our method uses empirical material to demonstrate the practical value of a philosophical outlook to particular individuals—but not to a carefully demarcated sample group or to people in general. So our method is ideographic rather than nomothetic. Consequently, many of the standard questions that are asked of an empirical investigation need to be asked differently of our inquiry. Sample size, for instance, is not a crucial issue, given that our aim was not to generalize across a population but instead was to find examples which illuminate how an Existential outlook can contribute to resilience. For our purposes, there is no magical number of instances needed to demonstrate the supportive value of an Existential outlook

In this inquiry, we are not seeking to derive hypotheses from previous empirical studies and then test those hypotheses; nor are we seeking to ascertain what percentage of a certain population find an Existential outlook to be strengthening. We are not seeking to measure the degree to which some people find an Existential outlook to be helpful. We have not constructed an instrument for measuring a person’s amount of Existential outlook, so we are not attempting to validate such an instrument. We are not even claiming to have a method for ascertaining whether the claims that a person makes about having found adopting an Existential outlook to be helpful are objectively true.

Investigating the role that a particular outlook can play in supporting resilience requires a method of capturing how individuals make sense of difficult experiences, and we contend that the narrative composition of life events is the major process through which persons make sense. As Epston, White, and Murray (1992) point out, “it is the stories in which we situate our experience that determines the meaning we give to experience” (p. 98). So it is in narrative accounts that people attempt to apply an outlook or a belief set to troubling events in such a way that those narratives and the events they contain have a coherent and preferably positive meaning.

We therefore conducted interviews in which we asked people not just for the details of difficult events that they had lived through and had come to terms with but also for how those events fit into the interviewees’ larger story or stories of their lives. Polkinghorne (1988) posited that “When a human event is said not to make sense … the difficulty stems from a person’s inability to integrate the event into a plot whereby it becomes understandable in the context of what has happened” (p. 21); and when Coutu (2003, p. 10) refers to the importance of the ability to find sense and meaning in difficult events—in her discussion of personal and organizational resilience—she points out that the dynamic of meaning making is inherently temporal: “resilient people build bridges from present-day hardships to a fuller, better constructed future.” In accordance with Coutu’s contention, Vough and Caza (2017) have recently found that individuals who have been denied promotions at work “experience positive outcomes when they construct growth-based stories about the event” (p. 103).

Gibson (2004) agrees that meaning making is inherently temporal, but reminds us that it is also causal. He argues that the primary concerns of the narrative frame are twofold: “A narrative presents a story which answers the reader or listener’s question of ‘What happened next?’ (temporality); and a narrative presents a plot which answers the reader or listener’s question of ‘Why did these things happen?’ (causality)” (p. 176). When we look for answers to the causal question however, we may need to look outside the narrative frame to sets of established beliefs about why things happen the way they do, such as religions, ideologies, cultures, or philosophies. This is why understanding the meaning that individuals see in the events they have lived through involves not only understanding where they have placed those events in episodic or whole of life narratives, but also understanding the background cultural, philosophical, religious, or ideological outlooks they are influenced by.

Our selection of interviewees was guided by the question we were seeking to address, which meant that the three authors separately each conducted screening interviews with ten people who were workplace colleagues or friends. Choosing who to interview was guided by each author’s judgment, after the screening interview, about how reflective each potential interviewee was, and also by the enthusiasm that potential interviewees expressed when asked if they would like to discuss how they dealt with and made sense of difficulties in their lives. Polkinghorne (2005, p. 139) argues that participants in qualitative research “are not selected because they fulfill the representative requirements of statistical inference, but because they can provide substantial contributions to filling out the structure and character of the experience under investigation.”

Each author then selected only three people from their initial set of ten, to interview in depth and across time. These were the three people whose experiences and ability to articulate their thoughts and feelings seemed most likely to assist the authors in understanding their sense making processes. We consider that people who are sufficiently reflective and articulate can be seen as expert informants concerning the nature of their own experiences and their processes of sense making. Our informants were also selected because in spite of life events that many people would experience as traumatic, they had achieved at least an average level of success in their careers, which we took to indicate resilience.

So we had a total of nine informants who were avowedly non-religious and non-spiritual, and who were each interviewed for an hour, on five separate occasions across three months. The depth of our inquiry and the subsequently complex nature of our interviews/conversations prompted us to use private meeting rooms and to ask that our informants turned off their mobile phones to limit distractions and interruptions. It was also important for us to establish trust and rapport with our informants, which we did by beginning each interview with an assurance of confidentiality and with questions about the current well-being of the informant along with sharing some information about the stresses and enjoyments that we were personally living through. We also took pains to ensure that our responses to whatever was said were always clearly non-judgmental.

Holding five separate interviews over time allowed us to move from initial questions about early life experiences, to questions about what were the most difficult life experiences for each person, to questions about the impact each person thought those experiences had on their thinking and feeling, to questions about major decisions they had made in their life, and finally to questions about what each person thought they had learnt from their life story about how to cope in a resilient fashion with the challenges that life presents to everyone. Given the open and free flowing nature of the interviews—we chose not to sit down equipped with an interview protocol or set of semi-structured questions—there were sometimes discussions with informants where questions that came from earlier, or what were intended to be later, interviews were asked.

We had anticipated that some emotionality would be provoked by the issues being discussed but were nevertheless surprised by the strength of those emotions, which sometimes caused informants to pause or take a break outside the interview room to calm themselves down. Although there are some researchers who hold that interviewees who become upset should be provided with assistance and perhaps counseling, we considered that doing so would run counter to the nature of our inquiry. We were, after all, investigating the usefulness of adopting an existential outlook in relation to resilience in the face of difficult and even traumatic events—but although we left interviewees to deal with their emotions using their own resources we did provide them with contact details for a counseling service at the end of the interview. Their emotionality left us uncertain about whether our interviewees had been able to deal resiliently with their difficulties or had instead found a way to suppress the emotional consequences that were still active within them. Another unexpected aspect of the interviews was the way that so many of the events discussed were seen by our informants as impacting their sense of identity. We comment upon the significance of identity in relation to Existential challenges during the presentation of our illustrative examples and in our Discussion section.

Interviews were recorded with the consent of our informants, and the first author transcribed those audio recordings. The transcriptions were then read by authors two and three, while listening to the tapes, to double check for accuracy.

The next task was to search through the interview transcripts looking for indications of our interviewees employing an Existential outlook, along with detailed accounts of how that outlook shaped the ways in which those interviewees made sense of, and coped resiliently with, the difficulties they had experienced. That task raised an issue to do with the reliability of our readings, which in effect were interpretations. “According to Silverman (2005), reliability can be defined as the degree of consistency with which instances are assigned to the same category by different observers or different occasions (p. 210)”.

We were keenly aware that interpretive bias could lead us to find examples of an Existential outlook being helpful because that is what we wanted to find. To reduce the likelihood of interpretive bias, we compared and contrasted our readings of transcripts from three differing perspectives, thereby adopting a qualitative version of triangulation: the lead author has a keen interest in and commitment to the positive value of Existentialism as a philosophy; the second author holds that culture works as a stronger frame of meaning than philosophically inclined outlooks; and the third author considers that narrative sense making frames meaning more strongly than other possible contributors to meaning, such as culture and ideologies.

To further address doubts about interpretive bias, we explain the thinking involved in the inferences that we drew from interview transcript details, along with spelling out the reasoning behind the interpretations that we made, as fully and transparently as possible as part of our presentation of the two illustrative examples in the next section of the article.

Two demonstrations of an existential outlook supporting resilience

In what follows, we present short selections from our conversational interviews with two of the key informants. The verbatim interviewee statements are interspersed with our interpretive comments that are based upon post-interview reflection, analysis, reference to the Existential outlook, and the issues raised by triangulation of author perspectives. These two informants were chosen to be our focus in this article because, of the nine interviewees, these two people had encountered misfortunes significant enough to challenge the resilience of anyone—in fact, in both cases, their ability to succeed in life and career was remarkable in the light of what they had each lived through. Given that there were nine interviewees, it is not within the scope of this article to present all the empirical material in full, particularly because we analyze, interpret, and comment during our presentation of the two selections. To decide on which selections to use in this article, each set of interview transcripts was read for segments that were most revealing in relation to our primary research question. Following that initial reading, the authors then conferred on what was being found and re-read each interview in the light of those individual initial findings, looking to check that on the first reading no important segments were missed. We use pseudonyms in the selections that follow.

Our first example presents interview material from Jack who works as a state-level manager in a national real estate asset business. Jack is a popular and successful leader within the business and yet his early life was marked by poverty, violence, and tragedy. Here is Jack answering the question: what do you think have been the most difficult or challenging experiences in your life, and how have you coped with or bounced back from those experiences?

Jack: I can certainly tell you about some of those experiences, but there have been far too many for me to talk about them all in one interview. So I need to choose which ones to talk about and you know, already as I’m thinking about that, I realise that there are far more negative or even traumatic events that come to mind than positive.

Later comments by Jack made it clear to us that although he acknowledges the importance of sadness and neglect in his life, the narrative he told, as a whole, has far more to do with personal courage and resilience than it has to do with victimhood. This is where Heidegger’s notion of “resoluteness” provides a way of interpreting Jack’s attitude toward even the tragedies in his life.

Jack: I suppose the most difficult life event for me has been my mother’s murder. To this day I still find it hard to talk about without becoming so upset that speech is sometimes impossible.

Researcher: Do you think that your mother’s murder has had an impact on how you think about death, including your own eventual death?

Jack: Yes. I know that her murder has influenced me to see death in a wrenching, violent way—not the peaceful scene of loved ones standing around a bed and saying their goodbyes.

Researcher: Do you think that what happened to your mother has affected how you have lived and worked?

Jack: Yes, in quite a few ways. First of all, it greatly distracted me from doing the work that would have pushed my career further and faster—but you know what? I don’t mind that; I don’t regret that. I’d much prefer to be someone who gave my mother the due time and sadness that she so greatly deserved than someone who tried to quickly forget and move on.

Researcher: are there other ways in which you have taken something positive from what happened to your mother?

Jack: now that you’ve asked, I realise that I’ve been able to develop a good sense of perspective about other troubles that come my way. For instance, last year in my performance review with the national manager, he said I needed to become better at thinking strategically, but when I asked him to explain what he thought strategic thinking is, he was just full of vague waffle like “look at the big picture; put our customers first; and think ahead.” I was seriously pissed off about that conversation for a while, but then compared my treatment with what had happened to Mum and I quickly just shrugged it off as not really mattering.

Jack: yes, totally different. In fact, I think that his death has been good for me.

Researcher: can you explain what you mean?

Jack: well, as you know, even though it was not my father who murdered my mother, during the thirteen years she was married to him, he would beat her and verbally abuse her almost every night. I hated the bastard and felt as a boy just as I do now that his violence was unforgiveable.

Researcher: Jack, when you mention things being balanced out, I recall that a few minutes ago you talked about feeling your life was uneven, that it had too much difficulty and tragedy in it. Where do you think the importance you place on evenness and balance comes from?

Jack: actually you’re right, I do tend to think a lot in that way. It’s the same when I’m eating dinner, for instance; if I put some broccoli on my plate I feel that balances out also having chops and chips on the plate, so that makes it ok.

Our second example comes from interviews with Harry who was born in 1954, in Broadmeadows (a working class suburb of Melbourne), to a white mother and a Koori (indigenous Australian) father. Although the family had little money, Harry’s mother was from a wealthy background, and insisted that the boy attend a private school in Essendon. This insistence and the accompanying drain on family finances contributed to an ongoing conflict within the marriage. Partly as a consequence of that conflict, Harry was sent to a Catholic boarding school in Grade Two. He works now as a high school principal. Here is Harry answering the question: what do you think have been the most difficult or challenging experiences in your life, and how have you coped with or bounced back from those experiences?

Harry: As I mentioned last time, I got locked away in a boarding school at grade two—the school uniform was my only clothing. It was a place of severe discipline, run by nuns, with daily prayers. Everything was ordered and had its time. I seem to have reacted against that in many ways. I’m certainly not Catholic anymore, and I’ve got no patience for discipline as a solution.

Researcher: last time we spoke you mentioned discovering your Koori heritage as being a highly significant event in your life, but was that also a difficult time for you?

Harry: Yes, discovering my Koori heritage after my father had died was a big challenge for me. It raised a lot of confusions and questions but also provided a lot of answers.

Discussion

The first noteworthy finding to emerge from our analysis was that for both Jack and Harry, the meaning of events over time has concerned them in relation to a sense of “things being right.” This finding aligns well with the Existentialist notion of authentic temporalizing—that it is not just particular moments that matter to us, but the totality of our moments—what they add up to. Making things right is one of perhaps many ways in which non-religious and non-spiritual people can experience a sense of resilience: subsequent events following his mother’s murder, particularly the later death of his father and the manner of that death, provided Jack with the feeling that at least one of those deaths was “right.”

Harry’s decision, after he discovered his father’s Koori identity, to proudly identify himself as Koori, gave him the sense of doing what his father was not able to do and thereby contributing to righting a wrong. In Existentialist terms, Harry personally appropriated—he chose to own and bring into being—the possibility that life provided him: becoming who his father really was.

For both Jack and Harry then, being resilient wasn’t about bouncing back quickly from one-off setbacks such as being mugged or criticized in a meeting; it was about being able to take an active and constructive approach to living in spite of suffering major losses. The sort of cognitive reappraisal that we have explored in this article involves reappraising major troubles over long spans of time, which underscores the analytic value in eliciting narrative accounts from informants. Narratives provide people with opportunities to configure or reconfigure the meaning of past events as changes emerge over time, so narratives can be used to see the past differently; in effect, time provides people with opportunities to re-author, and thereby make different and ideally better sense of, the most difficult experiences in their lives.

A second noteworthy finding drawn from our analysis is that neither Harry nor Jack needed to subscribe to a religious or spiritual outlook to cope with their challenges. Jack asks himself what his mother would want him to do and in that way was able to internalize her motherly care for him as self-care: he has been able to stay within a realistic view of life as he practices resilience. Harry says that living proudly and openly as a Koori Australian balances out or makes up for what his father was not able to do, which makes it possible for him to redress that imbalance by action now rather than wishing for the world to somehow be made right in an afterlife.

It is highly likely that Existential philosophers would be comfortable with their strategy. Sartre, for instance, would definitely be unhappy if Harry and Jack had borrowed spiritualist notions about how events and people are connected. Sartre consistently railed against narratives which went beyond contingency. “Going to the cinema he would see films in which narrative necessity linked all the elements together; walking out into the street he would notice a striking absence of necessity” (Freeman, 1993, p. 21). In Sartre’s view, novels should avoid the falseness of narrative necessity: the future actions of the characters must not seem to have been fixed in advance by heredity, social pressure or any other force (Hayman, 1986). Anyone who composes a narrative has to take a position on causation, and Existentialists who closely follow Sartre would reject the borrowing of causal connections from thinking which reaches out to possibilities beyond the real.

This is one reason why, earlier in the article, we sought to characterize an Existential outlook in ways that only approximate Existential philosophy rather than closely following it. We want to discover how non-philosophers are able to make better sense of difficulties in their lives, and it would therefore be self-defeating to conduct research which was tightly constrained by the views of particular philosophers.

Our third noteworthy finding is that searching for ways to resolve issues of personal identity played a key role in how both Jack and Harry managed to make sense of the most difficult events in their lives—and in both cases, their identity resolution resonated strongly with having an Existentialist outlook. As we have seen, Existentialists argue against unthinkingly accepting socially inscribed interpretations of who we are and propose that we should instead accept the responsibility to authentically choose how to live and who to be. We saw Jack suddenly recognize that he needed to reconsider his identity in the “glance of an eye” that Heidegger calls “augenblick,” when he compared his habit of reading Aristotle with the behavior of his peers. Similarly, Harry was confronted with a decision about whether to disown the newly discovered Koori part of his identity or choose to make it central to his interpretation of who he is. Jack and Harry both have found it important and helpful to choose who to be in relation to their lives as a whole: their mortality. Heidegger maintains that we are authentic when we recognize and forerun the inevitability of our death; which we do by choosing who to be in relation to the meaning of our lives, the meaning of our life stories.

As researchers, we are keenly aware that selecting and presenting the two examples that best support our contention could be seen as a serious limitation, as mere anecdotalism. Gibbert and Ruigrok (2010) explain that

the single main challenge for qualitative researchers wishing to ensure validity is to convince themselves (and their audience) that their findings are genuinely based on critical investigation of all their data and do not depend on a few well-chosen examples. (p. 713)

Nevertheless, we did seek to prevent interpretive bias by triangulating our three alternative perspectives of sense making in which either culture, narrative, or an Existential outlook is taken as primary. The resulting discussions held among ourselves as interpreters of our interview transcripts were marked more by agreements in our readings than disagreements, and we consider those agreements result from the underlying similarities across the three perspectives. Existentialism seeks to heed, to be caringly attuned to, the human project of life and its experiences. Similarly, narrative theorists alert us to the temporal and contextual nature of experience, and to life as project: life as the meaning of what one has undertaken and undergone.

Existential research is a search for what it means to be human, as revealed by our understanding of lived experiences, and by our comportment in the world. Similarly, narrative theorists provide us with a perspective on what it is to be human, to be a self as a narrative centre of gravity. Finally, cultural theorists alert us once again to the role that meaning and interpretation plays in human lives. Geertz (1973) for instance, emphasized that culture is “the accumulated fund of significant symbols” which a person uses “to put a construction upon the events through which he lives” (p.45).

Although we do not claim that the research reported in this article was designed to be scientific, we do claim that it has produced important new knowledge. By demonstrating how people can use an approximately Existential outlook toward their lives and their troubles in ways that support resilience, we now know two new things. Firstly, we know more than before about how non-religious people can use an Existential outlook to support resilience; and consequently, we know that it would be worthwhile designing a larger, thoroughly scientific research project to investigate further. In particular, by exploring the sense making of a larger group of informants, separated into different age groups and different cultures for instance, it would be possible to identify common interpretive strategies that people of different ages and cultures actually do find helpful rather than what we guess they find helpful.

The most important limitation of our research is that the examples we presented were both primarily concerned with coming to terms with the death of a much-loved parent. There are many other ways in which a person can be faced with loss or struggle and it may well turn out that the interpretive strategies and philosophical outlooks that support resilience differ in relation to different types of challenge. Considerable additional data gathering and analysis is needed before we can confidently claim to have comprehensive insights into the approaches to sense making that are helpful across a more varied study of how people come to terms with major setbacks and tragedies.