Take social media as the perfect illustration of how we try to escape from ourselves. Scrolling through Instagram, we see carefully curated versions of other people's lives that suggest a constant stream of excitement and fulfillment. It's easy to get sucked into comparing our messy realities to these polished online personae and feeling like we're coming up short. But as Sartre explained, we are condemned to be wholly free - there is no objective standard we can measure ourselves against or hide behind. No matter how many likes we get, we ultimately have to take responsibility for charting our own course. Sartre may have lived without memes, but even he couldn't have imagined the genius ways the internet helps us forget our own mortality.

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