Chapter 25

So, why does any of this Heidegger stuff matter?

Because it’s not just abstract philosophy—it’s about who we are and how we make sense of our lives. Heidegger shows us that the skills we develop shape our identities. When we learn to use things—whether it’s a hammer, a guitar, or a diesel engine—we don’t just gain competence. We gain an authentic understanding of those things, and the world opens up to us in ways it wouldn’t otherwise. It’s like unlocking hidden levels in reality. The deeper we go into our skills, the deeper we go into the world itself.

Viktor Frankl said that meaning in life comes from three possible sources: work, love, or courage in the face of adversity. One way to claw some meaning out of existence is through work—through doing something that matters to us. And if we pay attention to what matters, we can go deeper into it by developing the necessary skills to fully engage with it. The more we engage, the more the world reveals itself. The more the world reveals itself, the more we become something authentic.

WITNESSING PROFESSIONALS

In Surviving, Robert Jay Lifton talks about witnessing professionals—people in certain fields who are in a unique position to “bear witness to truths” about the world. These are the professionals who don’t just do their jobs but have seen something—something deeper, something the rest of us might never understand.

Take the scientists who worked on the atomic bomb. Some, like Eugene Rabinowitch, weren’t just brilliant physicists; they were witnesses to the destructive power they had helped create. They understood its full implications in a way that most people couldn’t. And because of that, they tried to stop it from being used on human beings. Their efforts failed, but their role as witnesses mattered.

Some people are in a position to see the truth before the rest of the world does. And sometimes, their job isn’t just to see—it’s to speak.

WITNESSING SURVIVORS

Lifton also talks about another kind of witness: the survivor.

Survivors of catastrophe don’t just live through something horrific; they come out the other side with knowledge—knowledge that the rest of society doesn’t have. And sometimes, the line between the professional and the survivor blurs. Survivors become professionals, professionals become survivors, and in that overlap, the truth becomes clearer.

If we take Heidegger seriously—if we approach being-in-the-world with care and authenticity—then these survivors, these professionals-with-special-wisdom, aren’t just people with sad stories or impressive resumes. They’re revealers of human truths. They have the ability to open up new understandings, new forms of activism, even new forms of radicalism. They see what others don’t. And if they speak, the world might actually hear.

HOW WE SEE THE SURVIVOR

“The moment of survival is the moment of power.” —Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power

Modern people have a strange relationship with survivors. We tend to see them as victims first, as people to be pitied. And, to be fair, when you barely make it through something horrific, it’s easy to collapse into victimhood. But Lifton points out that survival is only half the story. The power comes from overcoming that victim identity—not being defined by it, but forging something from it.

Ancient cultures understood this better than we do. Back when death was more in-your-face—when wooden drums signaled executions, when people in some cultures literally sat on piles of corpses like grotesque beanbag chairs—survivors weren’t pitied. They were feared. They were seen as something more than human.

Canetti writes about how, in many ancient myths and tribal histories, entire peoples traced their origins back to a single survivor—the last one standing after some great catastrophe. Survivors weren’t just lucky; they were chosen. They weren’t victims; they were the foundation of something new.

One of my favorite examples from Crowds and Power is the story of a war between two South American tribes, the Cabres and the Caraibs. The Cabres wiped out most of the Caraibs, captured a few survivors, and then—just to really drive the point home—ate them. But they left one man alive. Just one. They made him climb a tree and watch as his people were butchered and eaten. And then they sent him back home to deliver the message of what he saw to his people.

The Cabres thought they were using this lone survivor as a tool of terror—a way to scare the rest of the Caraibs into submission. But the survivor didn’t return as a broken man. He returned as a witness. His people saw a spirit in his eyes, and instead of being paralyzed by fear, they were galvanized by it. The entire Caraib tribe united, and they literally wiped the Cabres off the face of the earth.

SURVIVAL AS POWER

Now, I’m not saying we should go full blood feud whenever we or someone we love is victimized. But the principle stands: Survival is not just endurance—it’s transformation.

To survive something terrible is to gain knowledge—hard, bitter, painful knowledge. The kind of knowledge that can hollow you out or fill you with fire. And what you do with that knowledge is everything. You can let it consume you, let it reduce you to nothing but a walking wound. Or you can use it. You can turn it into meaning, into wisdom, into a new mission.

To survive is to gain something the rest of the world doesn’t have. And that something—if you let it—can bring you power.

AUTHENTICITY  

“You wouldn’t have hired me if I told you the truth … It’s paperwork alright that shit is meaningless. I’m good at my job because of my mental illness. I can stop a bipolar kid from jumping through a window on a fuckin’ 26-call.” —Ian, Shameless

Before I got promoted to supervisor at the facility, the director of operations who knew me well when I was a patient, called me up. He said, “Dude, you are good at this job.” He’d heard in a meeting that they were going to offer me the position. Also, the transitional housing manager at the time—who had been just a regular worker back when I was a patient—called me a “Godsend.” And look, I’m not here to toot my own horn, but I started realizing that I was able to do things that other workers just couldn’t do.

I could build relationships with patients that other staff never developed. I could get a combative patient to calm down. I could convince a guy who was halfway out the door to stay. When people broke down, when they hit their lowest point, they’d ask for me. They trusted me. And because of that trust, we could work through things together—things that, with the wrong approach, might’ve been impossible to overcome.

The world started opening up to me. And not just my world, but the patients too. A lot of those guys were inspired by what I was doing—not just because I talked the talk, but because I walked it. My authenticity made them think about their possibilities. If I could crawl out of addiction and turn my life around in this exact program, then why couldn’t they? When the FFR coaches had them write down their goals for after discharge, a lot of them wrote that they wanted to come back in two years—after staying sober—and work at the facility, just like I did.

That’s the thing about witnessing something real: it cracks open the illusion that things are impossible.

Out of This World

Now, I know I’ve been boiling Heidegger’s ideas down to make them more accessible—philosophy-lovers can get all pissy about simplifications, but I figure if you can’t explain something to a guy on the street, you probably don’t really understand it yourself. That being said, what I think Heidegger is trying to show us is that, yeah, we get lost in the day-to-day. They swallow us up. We become fallen into routine, into this automated existence.

But we don’t have to stay there. There’s a way to snap out of it. To throw ourselves toward something greater.

There’s a way to own our existence, to carve out an identity that isn’t just handed to us, but is authentically ours. And the moment we start caring—really caring—not about the rat race or social value system—but about our being-in-the-world, about what we do and why we do it, things start revealing themselves to us.

And when they do, we stop being just another They.

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