A session with a client I had recently brought up some reflections about finding the meaning in life that stayed with me long after our time ended.
She was reflecting on her year and was feeling like she didn’t achieve anything, no tangible outputs or accomplishments to show for it. When I pointed out that she was measuring her year through the lens of achievement and productivity, she paused.
Then she shared a moment from the day before. It was the school holidays, so there was no early morning rush the next day. She and her son went for a walk and he opened up to her in a way he wouldn’t have if they’d been in their usual morning rush. It was a beautiful moment of connection — short-lived, but real.
But then she asked, with a kind of weary resignation: “What’s the point?”
Because at the end of the day, they still have to go back to the routine. Back to work. Back to the system.
To explain further, she gave another example. She reflected on the impact of disasters, like the recent floods in Indonesia or fires in Hong Kong. People pause to grieve. But no matter how heavy its effects are in their lives, three to six months later, they’re back to work, back to survival mode. The tragedy and the worries, the emotions it brings are seemingly pushed to the back of their heads because everyone has to keep going.
In these moments, the pattern feels less like an individual struggle and more like something we are all woven into — a shared rhythm of grief, endurance, and return.
There’s this tension between producing and being. Perhaps another way of putting it – our soul vs the system. Between what the system demands of us and what actually gives life meaning.
The Question of Agency: Who’s Deciding How We Live?
I ended our session by suggesting that maybe it comes down to autonomy and agency. In that moment when her son wanted to talk, she could have said, “We need to brush teeth, pack bags, get ready” and blamed it on the system. Or she could frame it as: “I chose to stay in this moment with him.”
The question is: Who’s deciding how we live? Is it the system, or is it us?
When Competitive Parenting Pressure Becomes the Only Logic
A similar tension came up in a conversation with my friend about primary schools in Singapore. I mentioned a school that I may consider for my daughter and she called it “the leftover school,” as compared to her daughters who go to very competitive, high-achieving schools.
What struck me wasn’t just the label, but the entire framework it represented. To her, certain schools are “better” because they’re feeders to top secondary schools, because children there will excel academically, because they produce results. The logic was so complete, so obvious to her, that my choice could only be understood as settling for less.
I felt my body resist before my mind could form a response. I didn’t want to engage further. Not because I couldn’t defend my choice, but because engaging would mean entering a conversation where we’d already agreed that schools should be evaluated by whether they help you “get ahead.” Where the starting premise is output, results, grades, competitive advantage.
My silence in that moment was its own answer: I’m not playing this game.
But her final comment lingered: “Well, this is Singapore we live in, right?”
As if that settles it. As if living in a competitive society means we have no choice but to adopt its logic, its measures of worth, its definition of a good childhood.
But is there a choice of not playing at all?
The Existential Perspective
1. The Individual vs. The System: How We Mistake Survival for Purpose
“The greatest hazard of all, losing one’s self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all.” — Søren Kierkegaard
We find ourselves thrown into a system with rules we didn’t write: work, achieve, compete, secure the future. We’re told this is survival and that we have no choice. And perhaps that’s true in material terms.
But the deeper existential tension is this: We become so consumed by surviving that we forget to ask what we’re surviving for.
We mistake the means (playing the game) for the end (living a meaningful life).
The system isn’t just external infrastructure. It’s a logic, a way of measuring worth, a lens through which we learn to see ourselves and others. When my friend calls a school “leftover,” she’s not just describing a school. She’s revealing how completely she’s adopted the system’s measures of value. When my client asks “what’s the point?” of a beautiful moment with her son, she’s showing how the system has taught her that only productive, goal-oriented activities count.
These meaningful moments are dismissed not because they lack value, but because we’ve lost the ability to recognize their worth.
The tension isn’t just between our needs and the system’s demands. It’s between our soul, what actually gives us life, meaning, connection,and the system’s colonization of our inner world.
2. Losing Yourself to the System: When the Unconscious Becomes “Fate”
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” — Carl Jung
The tragedy isn’t just that the system demands conformity. It’s that we internalize those demands so completely that we can no longer distinguish between what we truly value and what the system has taught us to value.
This is what Jung meant by the unconscious directing our lives. And in our context, the “unconscious” is the system’s logic that we’ve absorbed so deeply we no longer recognize it as one way of seeing. We experience it as reality itself, as “just the way things are,” as fate.
The practice of making the unconscious conscious requires deliberate self-reflection and questioning.
When my client dismisses a meaningful moment with her son as “pointless,” she’s not making a conscious choice. She’s operating from an internalized script she didn’t write. When my friend says “this is Singapore we live in,” as if that settles everything, she’s not examining whether this logic serves her or her children. She’s surrendered to what she believes is inevitable.
In a place like this, freedom is not activated in how we make choices. We believe we’re choosing, but we may be simply executing a program we’ve downloaded without realizing it.
This is what existential philosophers call “bad faith” — when we deny our own freedom by hiding behind external necessities. “I have no choice,” we say. “The system makes me do it.” But in that very moment of saying “I have to,” we’re making a choice. It is the choice to surrender our agency, to disappear into the collective, to lose ourselves.
The most insidious part?
We lose ourselves so quietly, so gradually, that we don’t even notice it’s happening.
We become strangers to our own desires, our own values, our own sense of what makes life worth living. We look at a moment of genuine connection and can’t see its worth because we’re looking through the system’s eyes, not our own.
3. Reclaiming Life Purpose: The Path of Self-Awareness and Living Intentionally
“Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.” — Jean-Paul Sartre
The existential question isn’t whether we can afford to escape the rat race entirely. It’s whether we can become conscious enough to recognize what matters when we see it and whether we can reclaim our power to choose, even within constraints.
But this reclaiming begins with self-awareness. Before we can exercise genuine agency, we have to see clearly: What have we internalized? What are we calling “necessity” that is actually choice? What are we dismissing as “pointless” because we’ve adopted someone else’s measures of worth?
The path forward isn’t just about making different choices. It’s about waking up to the fact that we’re choosing at all.
Questions for Finding Yourself Again
Some questions that might help surface what’s been hidden:
On what truly matters and questioning life purpose:
- When you imagine yourself at the end of your life, what moments do you think you’ll remember? What will you wish you had more of?
On fear, the system, and agency:
- What do you fear about going along with the system? What do you fear about going against it?
- Which fear is louder? Which fear is more honest?
On identity, losing yourself, and reclaiming meaning:
- Who are you without the system’s measures of success?
- Who does the system allow you to be? Who does it not allow you to be?
- What parts of yourself have you set aside to play the game?
These questions may not produce answers immediately. And even if they do, the answers may not be comfortable. They’re designed to interrupt the rational justifications we use to avoid confronting deeper truths. They invite us to look at what we’ve sacrificed, what we’ve internalized, and who we’ve become in the process.
The Challenge: Finding Agency Within Constraints
The ultimate existential challenge isn’t whether to reject the system or embrace it. It’s whether we can become conscious enough to author our own lives — to choose what we participate in, what we resist, and what we reclaim as our own, even within the constraints we face.
Because in the end, the question isn’t whether the system has power over us. It’s whether the system has become us and whether we still have the courage to find out who we are underneath.
About the Author
I am a BPS-accredited and SPS-accredited Counselling Psychologist with a Doctorate in Existential Psychology from the New School of Psychotherapy and Counselling in London, U.K. My care philosophy is not to diagnose, label, or categorise but rather to work with the individual in front of me in the here and now.
My clinical credentials certainly play a significant role in defining my professional identity. But to foster a deeper connection and authenticity, I invite you to discover my other “Selves”, the various facets of who I am.
