Today, I am meeting with a group of educators to discuss piloting an ** existential health initiative** in K–12 public education. We are exploring how education might help young people develop their relationship with being human alongside their academic abilities. That work needs to extend into higher education, where questions of identity, belonging, purpose, and responsibility acquire new urgency as students make consequential decisions about their lives.
Over more than thirty years of accompanying people through the unraveling of beliefs, identities, and ways of life they once trusted, I have become interested in a kind of unpreparedness that achievement often conceals. A person knows how to meet expectations, earn recognition, and explain the decisions that brought them somewhere. What they struggle to explain is why the life they have worked so hard to establish feels increasingly difficult to inhabit.
Education is frequently part of that story, though seldom because it failed to provide useful knowledge. Sometimes it provided an extraordinary amount. The person has learned to analyze difficult material, solve demanding problems, and function within complex institutions. Yet the question of what deserves their allegiance remains entangled with the question of who will approve.
I recognize something of myself in this. My theological education gave me an elaborate language for explaining existence. My life eventually required me to examine what that language prevented me from acknowledging. Knowing how to defend an account of reality had not prepared me for the experience of discovering that I could no longer honestly live inside it.
That experience continues to shape my work in existential health. It also shapes the question I bring to higher education: What does it mean to prepare someone for the future if they have never learned how to inhabit their own life?
This essay was prompted in part by ** a recent piece on the wisdom turn in higher education**. Its call for universities to reconsider their purposes connects with a question at the center of my work in existential health: what capacities help people inhabit the lives their education prepares them to lead?
There are compelling arguments for a wisdom turn in higher education. Universities face legitimate questions about whether their educational purposes reach far enough beyond professional qualification, economic contribution, and the production of specialized knowledge. An institution devoted to learning ought to welcome scrutiny of what its graduates are learning to live for.
The argument requires care, however. Universities have never had a single purpose, and their histories include vigorous traditions of ethical inquiry, public service, intellectual dissent, and humanistic education. Those traditions are resources for renewal. We weaken the case for change when we describe the university as though it has always been nothing more than a factory for workers.
The more searching question concerns the relationship between an institution’s declared values and the forms of life it rewards. A university might speak eloquently about intellectual courage while making professional security depend on avoiding certain questions. It might celebrate human flourishing while organizing everyday life around competition, exhaustion, and permanent comparison.
Students encounter these contradictions through ordinary experiences. They notice whose work receives attention, which ambitions sound respectable, and how uncertainty is received by people with power over their futures. They learn whether changing direction suggests intellectual seriousness or a failure to stay on track.
An education therefore includes an implicit account of what makes a person valuable. Its lessons reach beyond the curriculum into the student’s relationship with effort, recognition, authority, and belonging. Long before graduation, a young person is absorbing a picture of the life they are supposed to want.
One of the central concerns in my work is the gap between capability and capacity. Capability concerns what we know how to accomplish. Existential capacity concerns how we encounter the realities within which accomplishment takes place, including uncertainty, responsibility, interdependence, suffering, and mortality.
A student might become highly capable at producing persuasive arguments while remaining unable to recognize when persuasion has become a defense against unwelcome evidence. Another develops sophisticated professional judgment but treats every personal disappointment as a verdict on their worth. Neither difficulty implies a lack of intelligence. Both reveal dimensions of development that intellectual achievement alone leaves unfinished.
Consider the graduate who has spent years pursuing a prestigious profession and begins to suspect that the ambition belongs more to their family than to themselves. The problem will not necessarily yield to better information about salaries or career prospects. They face the possibility of disappointing people they love, relinquishing an admired identity, and proceeding without assurance that a different choice will work.
That situation calls for capacities an education ought to take seriously. The graduate needs enough self-trust to register their experience without immediately disqualifying it. They need to distinguish a considered commitment from an obligation sustained by fear. Whatever they decide, they must reckon with consequences that no adviser is able to remove.
These capacities develop through participation in life, and universities are among the places where that participation takes shape. Academic difficulty, friendship, disagreement, failure, and changing commitments already bring students into contact with them. The educational question is whether those encounters receive thoughtful attention or are treated as interruptions to the real work.
An institution has reason to be concerned when it strengthens a person’s ability to act without attending to their relationship with the purposes directing that action. Greater capability expands the reach of judgment, including judgment that remains dependent on prestige, fear, or unexamined assumptions. Education carries responsibilities proportionate to the power it helps confer.
I use existential health to describe the human relationship to existence itself. Meaning, identity, belonging, uncertainty, mortality, and self-authorship belong within that relationship. They concern how a person lives with the conditions of being human, including conditions that no amount of expertise will abolish.
This relationship is present in every educational setting. It enters through the student who experiences an ordinary setback as evidence that they have no future. It appears when belonging requires someone to conceal their background or convictions. It shapes the ambitious student who has become so practiced at anticipating approval that their own interest is barely audible.
These are not all clinical problems, and they should not automatically become clinical problems. Mental health care is essential where it is needed. At the same time, a person’s distress sometimes contains an intelligible encounter with the way their life is organized. They need room to examine that organization as well as support in enduring its pressures.
A university that takes existential health seriously would ask what happens to a student’s sense of self when achievement becomes their principal evidence of worth. It would examine whether its account of success leaves room for an honest change of direction. The institution would become interested in the possibility that some forms of apparent adjustment involve learning to disregard one’s own experience.
Existential health offers a language for addressing these questions without prescribing a single philosophy of life. Students would remain free to interpret existence through religious, secular, philosophical, and cultural traditions. The shared concern would be their capacity to engage those interpretations honestly, recognize their consequences, and live alongside people whose conclusions differ.
Such an approach requires intellectual rigor. An experience deserves attention without making every explanation of it equally persuasive. Self-trust develops alongside the willingness to test an interpretation, receive criticism, and revise a judgment. Education should help students bring their lives into inquiry without placing those lives beyond inquiry.
The language of wisdom offers an appealing response to the limitations of education organized around performance. It also introduces a question that deserves more attention than it usually receives: Who will have the authority to recognize wisdom, and how will that authority remain answerable?
Institutions are adept at turning desirable qualities into standards of belonging. Once wisdom becomes an educational ideal, students will begin to infer what a wise person is expected to sound like. They might discover that the institution favors a particular vocabulary, emotional style, political sensibility, or account of social change.
A student then faces another opportunity to become proficient at appearing correctly formed. They learn to speak of humility without taking an intellectual risk, or to affirm transformation without questioning the arrangements that reward them. The vocabulary changes while the underlying dependence on approval continues.
My years in and beyond religion make me alert to this possibility. Communities devoted to love, truth, and spiritual maturity sometimes become places where members must suppress what they perceive in order to remain recognizable as good. Educational institutions deserve the same scrutiny whenever an admirable ideal becomes a measure of personal legitimacy.
A credible wisdom education would allow students to question its account of wisdom. Faculty would need to show how they reconsider their own positions, distinguish conviction from certainty, and respond when criticism exposes a contradiction between their teaching and their conduct. The institution’s practices would carry more educational weight than its language.
Self-authorship belongs here, understood as the developing responsibility to examine and participate in the commitments shaping one’s life. It involves learning from others without granting any person or institution permanent possession of one’s judgment. A university serious about this development must accept that some students will use their education to challenge the university’s own image of a successful graduate.
Contemplative practices, deep listening, and reflective inquiry have a worthwhile place in education. They offer opportunities to notice experience before responding automatically and to remain present when difficulty tempts us toward evasion. Their value depends partly on the conditions in which they are taught and the purposes they serve.
A student who learns to settle their attention might become more able to recognize an unsustainable life. That recognition could lead them to question expectations their institution regards as normal. A practice intended to cultivate awareness loses much of its integrity if awareness is welcome only when it helps someone resume performing.
The same issue arises with resilience. There are difficulties worth enduring because a valued commitment requires effort, disappointment, or sacrifice. Others persist because an institution has transferred the cost of its arrangements onto the people with the least power to change them. Students need help discerning what they are being asked to endure and why.
From an existential health perspective, contact with reality includes contact with institutional reality. An educational environment that encourages honesty must make room for what honesty reveals about workload, financial insecurity, discrimination, status, and access to support. Reflection has consequences when it reaches the conditions under which people are expected to flourish.
Universities would therefore need to examine the incentives attached to their ideals. If students receive the strongest rewards for overextension, a seminar on balance has limited credibility. If belonging depends on concealing vulnerability, an invitation to authenticity asks students to assume a risk the institution has yet to address.
This work is demanding because the contradictions are seldom attributable to one bad actor. Faculty, administrators, and students often inhabit pressures they did not design and struggle to resist individually. Existential seriousness begins with making those pressures discussable, then accepting responsibility for the arrangements over which the institution does exercise influence.
The call to educate responsible agents of change is understandable. Students are entering a world marked by ecological damage, technological disruption, social conflict, and profound uncertainty. They deserve an education that helps them understand these conditions and participate thoughtfully in addressing them.
Yet another burden emerges when young people are taught to understand themselves principally as the generation that must repair the world. The moral ambition of that expectation does not prevent it from becoming overwhelming. A student already anxious about being useful might hear a higher demand for usefulness, now carrying the weight of planetary survival.
Existential health brings human limits into this conversation. Responsibility involves discerning where to act, what to sustain, and how to remain answerable for the consequences. It also involves recognizing that no individual life will resolve the full conditions into which it is born. Omnipotent responsibility eventually distorts the very care that gives rise to it.
Students need an education spacious enough to include experiences that will never become impressive contributions. Grieving a parent, caring for an ill friend, learning to love without possession, and living through a season without clear direction are substantial parts of being human. Their worth does not depend on whether they produce a compelling account of leadership.
Mortality also belongs within an honest education. A finite life makes choices consequential because time, attention, and opportunity are limited. Encountering that limit thoughtfully helps a person ask what deserves their hours, including hours that will yield neither distinction nor public recognition.
An education concerned with flourishing should leave students better able to recognize a worthwhile life in its ordinary forms. Public service and ambitious achievement remain valuable possibilities. So does the quiet responsibility of making a household, a friendship, or a small corner of a community more inhabitable.
Existential health would remain marginal if it appeared only as an elective, a support service, or an occasional invitation to reflect. Its deeper contribution concerns the way education is practiced across disciplines. Every field offers opportunities to examine how knowledge, power, responsibility, and human purposes meet.
In professional education, students would have sustained opportunities to investigate the assumptions embedded in their future work. A business decision would receive attention for the kind of life it creates for employees and communities, alongside its financial logic. Technical projects would include serious inquiry into whose needs define the problem and whose experience remains outside the proposed solution.
The humanities would retain their intellectual substance while inviting students to consider what interpretation asks of the interpreter. Encountering a text about freedom is different from recognizing where one has exchanged freedom for security. The relationship between those activities deserves attention without turning every classroom into a…
