Sartre would buy you a coffee and then inform you that you chose to drink it. Not wanted to. Not decided to. Chose. Freely. Without excuse. And that the act of drinking coffee — right now, in this cafe, with him — was a declaration of who you are. Not a habit. Not a preference. A moral act for which you are entirely responsible.
He did this to everyone. Students, lovers, strangers in the Cafe de Flore where he wrote for eight hours a day, chain-smoking Boyards, drinking black coffee until his hands trembled, producing pages at a rate that made other philosophers suspect amphetamines. They were right to suspect. He took corydrane — a mix of aspirin and amphetamine — daily for decades. He didn’t hide it. Hiding things would have been bad faith.
Bad faith. That was his phrase for the thing most people spend their lives doing: pretending they don’t have a choice. The waiter who says “I am a waiter” as though it were a biological fact rather than a decision renewed every morning. The soldier who says “I was following orders.” The friend who says “I had no choice but to lie.” Sartre would listen to each excuse with the patience of a man who’d heard them all, then dismantle it with a question so simple it felt like an insult: “But you could have done otherwise, no?”
The Dare
He dared an entire generation to stop making excuses. Existentialism wasn’t an academic theory to Sartre — it was an accusation. “Man is condemned to be free.” Condemned. Not blessed, not gifted. Condemned. Freedom wasn’t a reward. It was a sentence you served every waking moment, and the punishment for ignoring it was becoming what he called a “thing” — an object, a role, a function. A waiter. A professor. A good person. All masks. All bad faith.
He lived the dare. He refused the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1964 — the only person to voluntarily decline it. His reason: “A writer must refuse to allow himself to be transformed into an institution.” The Swedish Academy offered him the money anyway. He refused that too. He said accepting would compromise his independence, and independence was the only thing a writer had that couldn’t be replaced.
He also refused the Legion of Honor. He refused a chair at the College de France. He refused everything that would have turned Jean-Paul Sartre into a title rather than a person making choices.
Your Excuses
Bring your reasons for staying in the wrong job, the wrong relationship, the wrong city. Sartre would listen. He was a good listener — better than his reputation suggests. He’d lean forward, pipe in hand (he switched from cigarettes to pipes in later years, though he still smoked both), and he’d let you finish.
Then he’d ask: “What would you do if you truly believed no one was watching?”
Not “what would you do if you could do anything” — that’s a fantasy question. Sartre’s version was surgical. He wanted to know what you’d do if the audience disappeared. If the parents, the boss, the social media followers, the internal narrator who judges everything — if all of them went silent. What would be left?
He believed the answer to that question was the only honest thing about you. Everything else was performance. He called it “the look” — le regard — the way other people’s perception freezes you into a character. You feel someone watching and you become the person they expect to see. The challenge was to act as though no one was looking, even when everyone was.
What He’d Think of You
Sartre wouldn’t judge your choices. He’d judge your refusal to own them. A person who chose cruelty and admitted it was, in Sartre’s framework, more authentic than a person who chose kindness and pretended they had no alternative. He didn’t want you to be good. He wanted you to be honest about what you were choosing and why.
He had a famously open relationship with Simone de Beauvoir that lasted 51 years. They told each other everything — including details of their other relationships. It was messy, sometimes painful, occasionally brutal. He didn’t recommend it. He just refused to pretend monogamy was anything other than a choice, and he refused to make that particular choice while claiming it was natural.
“Freedom is what we do with what is done to us,” he said. Your childhood, your trauma, your circumstances — all real. All shaping you. And none of them an excuse. You are still choosing. Right now. Every second. The coffee is getting cold and you’re still sitting here, which means you’ve chosen to keep listening.
He’d respect that. Not because listening is virtuous. Because you could have left, and you didn’t, and now you have to own that.
He didn’t want you to agree with him. He wanted you to stop pretending you had no choice. Talk to Sartre.