An Existentialist vs. Essentialist Guide to Place, and hello!

first post on substack :O

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There’s a question I like to ask people I meet:

“city or country?”

It’s not a particularly deep question; people tend to choose quickly, based off of personal preference in the obvious environmental elements of their choice. They speak of the city's energy or the country's quiet, of social scenes or natural landscapes. But no matter what answer is given, there is a common denominator: the environment is perceived as a passive backdrop for a pre-existing self.

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This perception belies a deeper, often subconscious, truth. The choice is rarely about finding a place that fits who we are, but about finding a place that will help forge who we want to become. I posit that physical environments directly influence the development of distinct worldviews. We will examine two archetypal environments: the City and the Country.

The central thesis is that the urban environment functions as an existentialist¹ apparatus, promoting a model of "existence precedes essence" through a mechanism of consumer choice. Conversely, the rural environment operates as an essentialist² framework, compelling a process of introspection to uncover a perceived innate self, or "essence."

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The city grants the individual a practical experience of the core existentialist premise. Upon arrival, one is a functional blank slate, defined not an intrinsic nature, but by the fact of one’s presence. The fundamental question is not "Who am I?" but "What will I do?"

This is the central mechanism: a form of consumerist existentialism. The unstructured freedom of creating a self ex nihilo³ is channeled into a structured freedom of choice. The city lays out a catalog of entire social ecosystems. Each is a fully-formed telos⁴, a pre-packaged and validated life path, complete with its own tribe, lexicon, and behavioral norms. The great existential act is thus transformed from creation into selection, and the primary choice is which tribe to join.

The process of self-formation follows a two-step logic. First comes external discovery: the act of choosing an identity from the marketplace. Second comes conformational sculpting. Once a path is chosen, the will is directed toward an inverted form of self-overcoming, a process accelerated by the pressure of the new in-group. Instead of creating one's own values in a Nietzschean sense, the individual actively cuts away any part of the self that is incompatible with the chosen script. The path, once chosen, sculpts the person.

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Consider the archetype of an individual who moves to a political capital with the ambition of becoming a "Policy Advisor." This selection initiates the conformational process. They adopt the industry's uniform, its schedule, and its lexicon. Hobbies or friendships that conflict with this demanding script are shed. Their personal political beliefs may even moderate or shift to align with the pragmatic realities of their chosen tribe. The person who emerges after five years is a product of the path they selected from the city's catalog.

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The rural environment operates on an opposing principle; its defining feature is a perceived vacuum of urban scripts. This setting functions as a tool for escaping what Carl Rogers termed "conditions of worth", or the need for external approval which obscures the authentic self. Where the city presents a marketplace, the country presents a mirror, silence, and crucially, a pre-existing community. The consumerist approach is impossible here not just for lack of a catalog, but because the dominant social structure is one to be integrated with, not selected.

The fundamental question is necessarily inverted, from the urban "What will I become?" to the essentialist's "Who am I?" The mechanism is a kind of negotiated introspection, a search for an authentic self reminiscent of Thoreau's retreat to Walden. The process again follows a two-step logic, but of internal origin. First comes internal excavation; lacking external models to choose from, the individual must engage in an Aristotelian introspection to locate an innate telos. Second comes expressive creation. Once this essence is discovered, the will is engaged not in conformity to a script, but in building a life structure from scratch, a structure that must manifest this truth while also navigating the existing social terrain. The person, once discovered, sculpts a path in conversation with their place.

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Again, consider the archetype of an individual who leaves a corporate job for a remote, sparsely populated region. Initially, they are confronted with an unnerving lack of structure. The silence forces a confrontation with the self, stripped of professional identity. Through this introspection, they discover a latent interest in manual craft and self-sufficiency. This is not an identity chosen, but a quality discovered. They begin the expressive creation of a new life, building a small workshop, developing a skill, and forming relationships based on shared practice rather than professional utility. The path is a direct manifestation of the person they discovered themselves to be.

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Of course, the modern landscape is populated by hybrid environments and confounding factors that blur the lines, each acting as its own unique philosophical engine. We consider the Suburb and the Internet.

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The Suburb presents itself as the resolution to the city/country dialectic⁵, but it is often better understood as an achieved destination—a physical symbol of economic stability. This status informs its entire philosophical structure.

In practice, it is a space of muted choices, but muted by design. The marketplace of identities is curated to a narrow selection of pre-approved life scripts (the good parent, the responsible homeowner, the community volunteer) precisely because these roles are perceived as the safest way to protect a significant social and financial investment. The pressure for conformity here is not the city's pressure to succeed, but the pressure to maintain a baseline of pleasant normalcy that secures the collective value of the community.

The existential stimulus of the city is absent; there is no possibility of radical reinvention nor spectacular failure. At the same time, there is no introspective silence of the country; the result is an anxiety that stems not from freedom or silence, but from the burden of the safe choice. It is the anxiety of a life assembled from compromises, deepened by the fear of losing a hard-won position of comfort. The central question is no longer the city's "What will I become?" or the country's "Who am I?" but the preservationist's "How do I maintain this?"

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The non-geographic space of the Internet represents the apotheosis⁶ of consumerist existentialism. On the surface, the "marketplace of telos" becomes infinite and operates at infinite speed. Identities can be selected, curated, and performed with unprecedented ease, detached from physical reality.

While promising the boundless freedom of the city, the Internet operates via algorithmic curation. Instead of an open commons of identity, the user is increasingly guided through a personalized gallery where choice is invisibly managed. Algorithms act as merchants that suggest and reinforce identity choices, creating feedback loops that can trap the self in an ever-narrowing chamber of its own curated performance.

This disembodiment accelerates the cycle of selection and sculpting but also renders the resulting self more brittle, dependent on a disembodied audience and a non-human system for validation. The Internet, offers the illusion of infinite existential choice while often delivering a state of hyper-curated conformity, trapping the self not in a physical suburb, but in an algorithmic one.

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The environment's philosophical pressure is not absolute. Human agency provides a crucial counterweight, allowing one to consciously work against the grain. This might look like the "urban hermit," whose life becomes a draining negotiation, constantly fighting to carve out a space for essentialist introspection against the city's demand for presence. Or it could be the "rural influencer," who uses the country landscape as a performative backdrop for a city-born identity, physically inhabiting the country, but with their sense of self tethered to an algorithmic city. In these cases, the individual is not passively shaped by the environment but is in conscious, often strenuous, dialogue with it. The self is forged in the tension between the external engine and the internal will.

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The urban/rural dichotomy serves as a model for environmental influence on ontology⁷. The City, as an existentialist apparatus, operationalizes the Sartrean⁸ premise of “existence precedes essence.” It transforms the project of selfhood into one of teleological⁹ consumption, where the self is actualized through a process of selection and conformation. The Country, by contrast, functions as an essentialist framework, substituting the city's marketplace with a vacuum that compels an internal excavation for a perceived, innate telos. Here, the self is not selected but discovered, and its expression becomes the primary creative act. The chosen geography therefore determines the primary modality by which the self comes to be.

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If the City is an engine of becoming and the Country an engine of being, then our current moment is defined by a deep confusion between the two. We are increasingly living lives of geographic arbitrage, attempting to import the city's marketplace of identity into the country's quiet, or seeking the country's authenticity within a small urban tribe.

The "rural influencer," an archetype mentioned earlier, serves as a perfect embodiment of this conflict: performing an existentialist script against an essentialist backdrop. The result is a new kind of ontological friction. We are physically in one place, but our sense of self is tethered to another. Perhaps the defining challenge of modern selfhood is not choosing between the city and the country, but learning to navigate the disorienting reality of inhabiting both at once.

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This post has been probably the most words I’ve written without an LLM ever since ChatGPT came out. I don’t really know what I’m going to do with this substack, but I always have thoughts to share, and instead of pestering my friends about them while they’re at work, I figure it’d be easier for everyone if I post them here.

More concretely, I might post expository math/cs related things, my takes about life (think along the lines of this post and lesswrong), and occasionally my answers to various years of the All Souls College Fellowship Examination.

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My writing style is still something I’m figuring out (I don’t write often these days, and I wasn’t exactly a fan of writing back in grade school). Even though I read a lot, only one person has ever genuinely inspired me to write. Shoutout to Cara for putting me on this website; you made it feel so much more accessible and made me less afraid to just share my stuff. Thank you :D

1. Existentialism: the belief that individuals create their own identity and meaning through choices and actions, rather than possessing a predetermined essence.

2. Essentialism: the belief that individuals possess an innate, unchanging essence that defines who they are, and that self-discovery involves uncovering this inherent nature.

3. Ex nihilo: out of nothing.

4. Telos: a purpose, goal, or end point that something is directed toward; an ultimate aim or intended outcome.

5. Dialectic: a method of examining and discussing opposing ideas to find the truth or reach a resolution.

6. Apotheosis: the highest point in the development of something; culmination or climax.

7. Ontology: the philosophical study of the nature of being, existence, or reality.

8. Sartrean: relating to the philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre, especially the idea that existence comes before essence and individuals define themselves through their choices.

9. Teleological: relating to purpose or goal-directed processes; concerned with the ends or outcomes something is meant to achieve.