Existentialism in Pop Culture
"Existentialism" sounds like a word built to intimidate, but strip away the jargon and it's really just a handful of questions everyone eventually asks themselves: Why am I always uneasy? What am I actually living for? If everything came easy, would any of it still matter? How do I stay myself under other people's gaze? And when I'm gone, what's actually left? This batch of Wisecrack episodes in the humanities domain happens to hand each of those questions to a different piece of pop culture you've probably already seen. The answers don't line up neatly — they sometimes talk past each other — but taken together they read less like a lecture and more like five people arguing their way through the same intro course.
Five Entry Points
Anxiety: why you're never quite at ease (Why Kierkegaard Thinks Anxiety is Good For You) This episode doesn't anchor on one work — it opens with a lineup of anxieties anyone would recognize (no retirement savings, elections, ecological collapse, the new "Anxiety" character in Inside Out 2) before asking: what if anxiety isn't a bug to be patched? Kierkegaard's answer is that anxiety is "the dizziness of freedom" — looking down from a cliff makes you dizzy not entirely because of the cliff, but because of your own eyes. The moment someone realizes the world could have been otherwise, that there's no necessary ground under their feet, that discomfort is freedom showing up for the first time. The episode offers no cure; if anything it argues the opposite — learning to sit with uncertainty has to become an ongoing practice, the first necessary step toward becoming yourself. Heidegger sharpens the distinction further: fear always has an object, anxiety doesn't — it's aimed at existing itself.
The "spark" was never the goal (Soul: Deep or Dumb?) In Soul, Joe assumes that finding a passion he can turn into a career — his "spark" — is the whole recipe for happiness, until the Great Before's counselor corrects him: a spark isn't a soul's purpose; you mentors keep conflating spark, passion, and meaning. The episode reaches for Heidegger's "thrownness" to explain where that mix-up comes from: we're dropped into the world with no say in the matter, and that freedom comes bundled with responsibility, which is where the anxiety comes from. Both 22 and Joe spend most of the film closed off because of it — 22 narrows passion down to a ticket out of limbo, Joe treats everything around him as a tool for a jazz career. The real turn is the old fish telling the young one: "This is water. What I want is the ocean — you're already in it." Meaning was never waiting at some destination; it was already in the ordinary life you hadn't gotten around to noticing.
What's left after you can win anything (The Philosophy of One-Punch Man) Saitama can end any fight with a single punch, and the cost is that every fight is boring — even his hair fell out along with his passion. The episode borrows Japanese theorist Masahiro Morioka's critique of the "pain-free civilization" to name where that emptiness comes from: a civilization devoted to minimizing pain and discomfort looks like progress but quietly hollows out the value of being alive — a society "pervaded by pain reduction mechanisms and filled with pleasure" ends up losing sight of joy and forgetting the meaning of life. Genos trains for years to avenge his family; Saitama throws one punch and the sacrifice becomes irrelevant. The episode refuses to offer comfort, closing on something close to a warning: don't get too comfortable — be grateful for your failures.
Death's second threshold (Pixar's Coco: Philosophy of Death) Miguel stumbles into the land of the dead and discovers death isn't just one thing. The episode borrows Baudrillard's claim that death is a social relationship: modern Western culture hands death entirely over to biology — your heart stops, you're dead. Coco stacks a second, symbolic death on top of that one: once no one living remembers you, you disappear a second time, for good. What passes between Héctor and Miguel isn't one-way pity — it's an exchange running in both directions: Miguel needs Héctor to guide him, Héctor needs Miguel to carry his photo back to the ofrenda. Life and death stop being opposites and become two states of the same exchange system.
Other people's eyes, and lying to yourself (The Philosophy of The Good Place) Eleanor dies and lands in the Good Place by mistake; her neighbor Chidi tries to teach her ethics well enough to earn her spot. The episode ultimately reads the whole first season as a modern remake of Sartre's No Exit — "hell is other people" isn't about other people being unpleasant; it's about letting their gaze define how you see yourself, which curdles into what existentialists call bad faith. The twist: the ethics lessons themselves don't seem to be what actually works — by season two, Eleanor has forgotten the coursework entirely and is still a better person, which the episode credits to moral intuitionism: what changes people may not be book knowledge but intuition worn in through repeated practice.
One Thread Running Through
Strung together, the five episodes trace a rough path outward from the self: Kierkegaard says freedom arrives dizzy, and that unease is everyone's starting point — not something to dodge. Soul picks up from there and asks what that freedom is actually for, and the answer isn't a résumé-ready "goal" — it's learning to open yourself to the ordinary life you're already standing in. One-Punch Man nails that answer down from the other direction: strip out the struggle, the pain, the uncertainty — freedom's price tag — and you don't end up happier, you end up empty; the struggle isn't the enemy of meaning, it's the source of it. The Good Place turns the camera from "how does one person live" to "how do people live together" — your freedom has to cash out under other people's eyes, and it's easy for that to curdle into letting them define you instead. Coco, finally, pulls back to the end of the line: what's left of the self that all that struggling built, once you're dead? As long as someone remembers you, you're still here — death itself turns out to be just another state in the same relationship. Anxiety, meaning, pain, other people, death: five words that look like they're covering separate ground, but line up into one continuous arc from discovering you're free to facing the fact that you'll eventually be forgotten. That arc is a reading assembled after watching all five — the episodes themselves never actually point at each other this directly.
Tensions and Differences
Soul lands on something close to "you already have everything, just be present" — a fairly comforting note. The Kierkegaard episode insists anxiety isn't something you resolve once and move past — accepting uncertainty has to stay an ongoing practice. The two moods don't quite match: one sounds like relief, the other sounds like a warning not to relax yet. Wisecrack's own verdict on Soul hedges accordingly — "deep-ish" — and the episode admits on camera that it isn't fully sure whether that ending is genuine insight or cheap comfort food.
One-Punch Man and Soul pull in more directly opposite directions: one says meaning requires pain and struggle, the other says the answer was already sitting next to you, no seeking required. Both use the same setup — something you already have, that you've stopped noticing — but they issue almost opposite instructions: one tells you to embrace suffering, the other tells you to stop chasing.
The Good Place's conclusion — that studying ethics doesn't reliably make you a better person, and that what actually works is intuition worn in through practice — sits in quiet tension with how confidently the other four episodes deploy anxiety, thrownness, and pain-reduction theory as explanations. If theory explained well enough still doesn't guarantee better behavior, what exactly are these episodes (this page included) supposed to accomplish? The episode doesn't dodge that question — it ends on it.
Questions Worth Sitting With
- If anxiety is freedom showing up for the first time, could the fog you feel when you say "I don't know what I want" actually mean you have too many options, not too few?
- Saitama's one-punch wins leave him empty; Joe's anxiety dissolves the moment he notices what he already has. If you had to pick one, would you rather live a life that never fails, or one that has to keep struggling?
- Do you know anyone like Chidi — someone who understands all the right theory and still can't act on it (maybe that's you)? If learning something doesn't guarantee you'll live it, what is the learning actually for?
- If being remembered is what "not having lived in vain" really means, would you rather be remembered for a specific achievement, or for some small, ordinary moment — the kind Soul says you already have?
- These five works answer "how do I live" with anxiety, meaning, pain, other people, and death. If you had to pick your own order, which of those five would you call the entry point, and which one only makes sense once you've already worked through the rest?