The Philosopher Who Diagnosed Everyone But Himself

Profound thoughts—these are hard. One man believed Western philosophy spent 2,500 years asking the wrong questions. What is justice? Plato. Knowledge? That Aristotle guy refined it. What is considered good? Oh, if my Philosophy 1 class taught me anything that’s Kant. The entire tradition revolves around definitions. Causality. Truth. Duty. Beauty. Even art. Yet, nobody stopped to ask what existence itself means. That wasn’t until Martin Heidegger came along in the 1920s.¹

Yes, the simple question sounds abstract. It isn’t. Being itself: the sheer fact that there is something rather than nothing. He argued this had been buried under an assumed obviousness for millennia. Somehow, Philosophy had skipped the foundation, the beams that held up the house, and built everything on white sand.

He started with the only being for whom existence is a question at all: us.

A rock doesn’t wonder about being a rock. The beach lets the waves wash over it. And I have no idea what my Labrador Retriever is thinking. Why does she rip up paper into tiny pieces at random? What’s the logic? Does she even think about who has to clean that mess up? Humans are different. We find ourselves in the middle of an existence we never chose, moving toward an unavoidable ending, wondering what to do with our given time. Weighty stuff, I know. Heidegger mapped this structure with a philosophic precision nobody had managed before. He called it Dasein—being there.

What does this mean in practice? Take John Mellencamp: ”I was born in a small town.” Mine had a certain slang, a gas station and corner grocery store, and local bars that shared stories—nothing about it was shaped by me, at least not initially. I showed up from the hospital, often napping in a clothes basket, with a past I surely didn’t write. That’s what our revolutionary philosopher called the condition.

But you don’t just inherit a past. Taking his logic forward, everyone projects. Always forward-focused. Toward certain possibilities, what might be made of the situation life dropped you into. The present is where thrown past and projected future meet. And everyone is playing a fast-moving, sometimes violent game, already in progress. No version of yourself exists prior to that social existence. The relationships, the way we curse, the shared understanding all come first.

Because anxiety comes with the territory, most of us hide in routines, everyday tasks, and inherited expectations. The morning run. Our coffee. Perusing the same news sites each morning. That reflexive email check. We dissolve into what Heidegger called das Man.—the trap of what everyone wants. Not Indiana Jones Temple of Doom malicious. Nothing that dramatic. The path of least resistance. The script that saves us from confronting our minutia, our present moment, what we want. Take the following:

• You stay within fifty miles of home because nobody around you ever talked like leaving was an option.
• You enroll at your parent’s alma mater because your family spoke about it like absolute destiny, not a choice. Wasn’t that Cameron in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off?
• You remain Catholic because that decision was made for you before belief was open to examination.
• You buy the Chevy Bronco because that is what your dad drove to work, and his dad before him. Brands live off this.
• You vote Democrat. Why? Because your grandmother relished what was known as the Blue Dog Coalition.

Heidegger hinted there was a way out of this predicament, assuming one wants out. I mean, how does one crawl out of the Matrix when Morpheus isn’t around to offer the red pill? Or do you choose the blue one? Using our big words again, our German philosopher called this Authentic Existence. Own the situation—the throwness as he called it. Or the possibilities, the finitude.² Stop running the same play everyone else is running and find out what the game is about.

What does this look like in practice? Heidegger would have asked: Which of your daily routines did you choose? Not the ones inherited from your parents, your industry, your day-to-day, or your peer group. The ones you examined and kept.

I doubt most people can name three. Audit yourself. Write them down. Then ask what you’re running from by keeping the rest.

Death is Key in Life’s Rodeo

We all die; let’s not talk abstractly. We all will, even the tech bros with all their blood boys on payroll. Not even Claude the All-Knowing can conjure the perfect vitamin combination to live indefinitely. Our existence is finite, non-transferable, and moving toward an end nobody can face for you.

But that’s a good thing. There is power here.

Death is the one gift that is ours. Someone can demote or fire you, tossing you to the curb Elliot Loudermilk style.³ Steal your money through a pig-butchering scam. Repossess your vehicle. Nobody can die your death. That ownmost possibility, defined by Heidegger, is what pulls us out of the crowd, away from groupthink, and forces the question of what we are actually doing with our time.

Productivity gurus obsess over systems. Time blocking. Morning routines. Optimized schedules. Pomodoro techniques. I love the YouTube videos detailing the morning routines of Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk or pick your billionaire of choice. Or the guy who runs ten miles before the first coffee. I hate him most of all, pretty sure he can cover that ground in less than an hour.

They’re close. Missing the point but almost there. Heidegger’s framework gives the diagnostic tooling broken into simple steps. First, everyone is thrown into a predicament. We project possibilities. There is finite time. These aren’t metaphors or philosophical notes; they’re constraints. And constraints, properly understood and not avoided or put off, tell us what to optimize and what to ignore.

The question isn’t whether to time block. It’s whether your time blocks reflect your ownmost possibilities or someone else’s script. Elon’s morning routine is his throwness, not yours. The ten-mile runner chose his daily ethos. The power is we get to choose our own. We make our own rules, and the productivity system that works is the one built from our personal experience, not a hacked template, not borrowed. Once this clicks all those bogus Buzzfeed productivity articles become noise.

Heidegger would have found internet social feeds and listicles appalling, spitting on all of our houses from his hut in rural Germany. Being conscious of facing death, making choices of how we spend our time, is not a time management technique. That’s an anxiety-inducing confrontation leading to task-managed oblivion wrapped into Zettelkasten productivity hackathons. The self-help version sands off everything that makes his philosophy real and sells an empty husk in the back shelves of Barnes and Noble. Instead of falling into these traps, pick your tool of choice. Your phone. Your task manager. Your note-taking app. What would Heidegger ask? Probably something like, Is this revealing the world, or turning it into standing reserve? When you talk to your wife or husband or best friend, are you present or mentally filing the conversation under relationship maintenance? When you open your task manager, do you see your day or do you see a resource allocation problem? Heidegger called this standing reserve—when everything, including yourself, becomes raw material waiting to be processed and deployed. The experience dissolves into optimization inputs. Your morning run becomes data: heart rate zones, pace per mile, recovery scores. You become annoyed because they’re disrupting your metrics. Your kid interrupts your work. You check that darned iPhone reflexively—not because you want to connect with someone, but because you’re harvesting notifications like a farmer checking crop yield. The phone buzzes. If the tool makes you feel like a system administrator for your own life, ding ding, the answer presents itself.

For him, technology isn’t a collection of tools. It’s a way of revealing the world. A framing that sees everything as a standing reserve of finite resources waiting to be optimized and deployed. A river becomes hydroelectric potential. A forest is a future subdivision. People aren’t people, just a budget line on a human resources payroll spreadsheet or an impediment to a proper earnings multiple.

The danger is not any specific technology. When everything is potential resource, including the air we breathe, the question of what things are genuinely disappears. Heidegger’s fancy terms lose out to utility.

His fears spread, examples are infinite because of the money involved. Sleep optimization using Oura rings and Whoop Bands. Glucose monitors pushed by the medical industry and our government as a means to lower healthcare costs. Social networking groups that hollow our relationships. Creativity being strip mined to build our latest AI overlords.

Heidegger foresaw the logic clearly, long before these latest trends materialized. He defined the structure. That’s what solid philosophical work looks like—it builds tools to find the story before the story has fully played out.

And to protect himself from the outside world, the man retreated to a Black Forest hut. Why? He was suspicious of cities. Of cosmopolitanism. Of what he called rootlessness. These weren’t personal preferences; rather, they were his philosophically load-bearing beams. His structure of living an authentic existence depended on them.

Well, until it all curdled.

The Black Notebooks Reveal an Insidious Failure

How do we know? The philosopher kept journals from the 1930s onward, giving instructions to publish upon death. When the Black Notebooks released in 2014, the story changed. They revealed that his philosophical framework had become a vehicle for antisemitism. In his mind, he warped society’s troubles onto German Jews—the symbol of everything wrong with the modern world. The cruelty of European antisemitism during the time period is that the association was imposed by exclusion and then used as evidence. Jews were banned from land ownership. From guilds. From most professions. Pushed into trade, finance, medicine, intellectual life. Then those domains end up becoming dominant economic forces. The group forced into them became the symbol of modernity’s threat. Exclusion created concentration. Concentration created visibility. Visibility created the scapegoat. An awful cycle.

Since stumbling upon his work, I’ve tried understanding how someone builds tools this precise, preaching to the masses, and then fails to use them. I’m not trying to find excuses, none exist, but as a diagnostic. What the heck happened? Because if Heidegger, who spent decades mapping the mechanisms of self-deception, fell into the exact trap he described, then the tools alone aren’t enough. The analysis doesn’t protect anyone. Knowing the structure of das Man doesn’t automatically pull you out of it. Maybe that’s the real lesson here, the one that makes his failure instructive rather than merely tragic. He had the map and still walked off the cliff.

Yes, Heidegger was a Nazi.

He built a structure to identify what was wrong with the mob, to fight off groupthink. He wrote books and tomes devoted to how people are shaped by situations they didn’t choose, how they find themselves in the middle of a game they didn’t start. Who was more perfectly suited to speak out about what was about to happen during the Second Great War than this guy?

Yet, he didn’t apply any of it. He failed, looking at the hard facts and instead fomenting awful, dangerous conspiracies. This is irony.

Das Man is the mechanism by which people absorb the assumptions of their surrounding culture without examining them, dissolving into inherited norms than confronting the present. Heidegger did exactly this. He absorbed the antisemitism of provincial German nationalism. Dressed it in his own made-up vocabulary. Never subjected it to the scrutiny he demanded of everyone else.

The philosopher of authenticity stood aside and watched millions be slaughtered in camps. The damning question I keep circling back to is what would it have taken? Not just for Heidegger, but for anyone in that position. He obviously had the intellectual capacity. Was it isolation? Did his prized rootedness calcify into a warped tribalism? Or was the framework itself incomplete—brilliant at diagnosis, silent on what to do when your inherited culture is made up of monsters? Not vampires or demons. But real ones. I don’t have an answer. Maybe there isn’t one because the pattern repeats itself.

Today we see figures like Tucker Carlson, hiding in a Maine cabin no less, recycling the same Jewish conspiracy tropes that Heidegger dressed up. Now, Carlson is not Heidegger. He’s not a philosopher and not an administrator inside a murderous state. But he performs a media-age version of the same intellectual temptation of refusing moral clarity because it feels too much like consensus. The vocabulary changes as rootlessness becomes globalism and cosmopolitanism becomes the evil elites. Same identical structure. Someone who built a career diagnosing media manipulation falls into the oldest, laziest form of scapegoating. Different era, different stakes, same old poison just in a bow tie.

Instead of hiding in rural Germany, what if Heidegger spent a month in Vienna? The city was a cosmopolitan, intellectually electric, deeply Jewish cultural environment. This was the world he so feared. Would the friction have done real work on him. Hannah Arendt, his counterpoint and former student, fled Germany. Her great insight was plurality; the world is filled with genuinely different people holding genuinely different perspectives. That’s not a problem. It’s the foundation of political life. She used the same philosophical starting point as her mentor and arrived in a different solar system.

How? Maybe, she forced a moral code into her philosophy.

Values make the difference. Arendt got thrown into the world in the most literal sense while Heidegger stayed in his hut and theorized. This is an example that our surroundings matter more than one likes to admit. And our ideas are shaped by the lives we live, the choices we make, the people we hang around with.

Take the Simple Step

So use Heidegger’s tools like a scalpel. Most of all, apply them where he refused to—including, especially, to him. Whatever you do, forgo the bow tie.

Don’t hesitate. Start by listing three inherited norms you’ve never questioned. The career path. Where you live. The way you structure your day. How you defend your politics. Then ask which of these projected possibilities are yours and which are das Man using your voice—that authentic one that whispers into your ear late at night. None of this is easy; Heidegger failed. Will you?

Footnotes