Fight Club Quotes

My honest opinion and my friendly advice is this: do it or do not do it - you will regret both.” (Brainy Quote). This idea that he putting forward is that people aren’t actually happy with anything. Life just leads you to a dead end and there isn’t any true satisfaction and gratification before one dies. The reason is because if one lives an aesthetic life, they will never obtain all of the material items or money they desire, and if they live an ideal ethical life they will compromise some happiness with the effort of being a “good” person or a “model citizen”, neither life choice is authentic. “We cannot achieve certainty in the making of such decisions” (Existentialism, Irvine).
Another side of this, however, is that people are happy or
will continue to be happy with the situation that they are in until they know they have another choice. The Truman Show is a movie starring Jim Carrey where he, Truman Burbank, is stuck in this pseudo-reality from the day he was born, solely for the viewing pleasure of the rest of the world. This sounds terrible, but from his perspective it was great. He was happy and he had the things he wanted. Truman wasn’t at any time forced to do things a certain way, influenced maybe, but that is the further it went. He made his own choices and his life went the way he wanted it to go. Only did he become unhappy when he realized that he was being “tricked”. However, if one really analyzes it, he had a choice for change all along, he just didn’t make it because he didn’t want to or feel like he needed to. Man thinks they will be happy if they have free reign over their life, yet they have had full freedom the whole time. “The secret to happiness is freedom… and the secret to freedom is courage”-Thucydides (Brainy Quote). Man just has to realize they are free to be free.
Based off of the idea that all people have the ability to make any choice that they want and when they want to make it, people still stick to the same old thing even if they are tired or unhappy with it. Thus their situations will not change and the same things will happen over and over giving them the idea that they have no free will and hence no freedom of choices. That is not true, because in spite of the unhappiness that causes, there is no effort to change. “In fact, being human sometimes involves decisions that transcend the realm of moral and conventional concerns” (Existentialism, Irvine). A familiar movie, Groundhog Day, illustrates this idea tremendously as the main character is faced with reliving the same day many times over and despite the same things happening, he makes the same choices repeatedly. He has to know that facing the same situation and making the same decisions will result in the same outcomes. It isn’t necessarily the choices he is making that is putting him down or making him become insane, but the perception he has on the circumstance he is in. If he looks at it positively and recognizes that he can make the best of his situation and really does have the freedom of choice to change it from bad to good and make it a favorable experience.
Existentialism is mostly about freedom of choices and it stresses that people have all the power to make the decisions they want to and every one they make affects them in some.
Because of that, people are technically fully in charge of their own happiness and if they will be successful or not. Who someone is or isn’t should not be determined by one’s surroundings, rather by the choices they make and who they want to be. Fight Club, an american classic, is all about choices and being unhappy with oneself. The main character isn’t out of the norm for where he is in life and is definitely not in a rough place but is still miserably unhappy. Existentialism states that happiness is not achieved through material items or possessions, but comparatively through authenticity and freedom (Allaboutphilosophy.org). Jack, the main character of Fight Club, realizes this after years of misery and makes a lifestyle change to achieve his goal of happiness by implementing his freedoms on life. He starts a “fight club” and organizes men to make the changes he wants to make. They follow a more authentic lifestyle by destroying the norms and boundaries society has placed on them and the community. They express their freedoms as a person and that they have no boundaries that society is trying to deposit on them, ‘...freedom is not defined by an ability to act; freedom is rather to be understood as a characteristic of the nature of consciousness, i.e. as spontaneity’ (Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy). Although they are striving and fighting for something different the are still not quite authentic according to the philosophy of existentialism because they are following each other’s paths and not their own unique one. Along with that, one cannot have a good and virtuous life full of accomplishments if there is not a sufficient amount of suffering and hardships, which these men that belong to fight club know all about because of the strenuous challenges they faced to qualify for the
club. Life really is just a long suffer until death, anyway. Such as Sisyphus, in The Myth of Sisyphus, by Albert Camus, condemned to roll a boulder up a hill and once at the top let it roll back down just to push it back up.