You have probably the greatest username I have ever seen on these forums. Every time I see it, I get jealous.
I wanted to ask you what Sartre says about the imagination, because I don't think people really understand existentialism. But then, neither do I. So I asked ChatGPT. And, fwiw, I wanted to invite you to check my work...if you feel like it.
Existentialism isn't the fatalist philosophy it is often portrayed as. When took World Lit in high school, I was taught that a core tenet of the philosophy was that life had no meaning and we were essentially born to die. That's part of the picture, but a misrepresentation of what it's actually about.
Sartre thought that life didn't have meaning in and of itself. We actually control our lives, through the choices we make, and those choices give our life meaning. It is therefore up to us to give life meaning. That's what "life has no meaning" means; it's not a fatalistic world view. It's actually an optimistic take on human potential.
For Sartre, the imagination was a key component in how we look at the world. It's part of our consciousness, which consists of intentional acts, and therefore plays a key role in the choices we make. In our imagination, we can see the world as it *isn't*. That allows us to ponder choices, and ultimately to remake our lives, not as they are, but as we imagine them to be.
A key part of Sartre's conception of existentialism is the concept of "bad faith" ("mauvaise foi," which literally means "bad faith.") Bad faith is something akin to stubbornness; it's a refusal to see things any other way than the worst way we can imagine them. Perhaps it's a refusal to use our imagination at all, because it would be a massive oversimplification to say that Sartre wants this concept to rest on the axis between "optimism" or "pessimism." The key component of our imagination, after all, is choice (when we imagine things, it's a conscious choice, not seeing things as they are). Repeating myself, but the choices we make give our life meaning.
All of this is a bit of an oversimplification, so, again, I want to invite you to comment on how accurate this is. Sartre could not have anticipated message boards or social media...but he didn't have to. There's something to his philosophy, and I'm curious if you think it applies here.