In everyday speech, we say someone is “just existing” as though it were a lesser state, and we praise those who are “truly living.” Living is associated with vibrancy, movement, colour; existing with inertia, stagnation, survival without spirit.

But what if it is the other way round? To live, after all, is the baseline of biology – plants live, animals live. They feed, grow, reproduce, and die. Living is ordinary because it requires no reflection, no choice, no rupture in the flow of instinct.

To exist, however, is something else. The very word shares its root with exit – to stand out, to step forth. Existence is heroic because it involves awareness, decision, the capacity to confront questions of meaning that no other living being can ask.

Jean-Paul Sartre placed this at the centre of his philosophy: “existence precedes essence.” We are not born with a fixed purpose, as other living things seem to be. A tree is destined to be a tree; a bird to be a bird. But humans exist before they become anything – and in that gap lies the burden and the freedom of choice. To exist, in the existentialist sense, is not mere endurance; it is to define oneself through decisions, to accept the responsibility of creating meaning in a world that offers none by default.

Other thinkers echo this. Heidegger spoke of Dasein – the human being as “being-there” – uniquely capable of relating to its own mortality, and therefore of stepping outside mere life into authentic existence. Camus, in his myth of Sisyphus, insisted that true existence meant confronting the absurd, and yet choosing to live fully within it.

So perhaps the common language has it backwards. To live is ordinary. To exist is extraordinary. Living belongs to the cycle of biology. Existing belongs to the realm of freedom, of crisis, of the heroic struggle to create meaning.

And maybe that is the true challenge of our time: not simply to live longer or live better, but to exist more fully.