Why staring at your own hands can trigger an existential crisis
A correspondence on the horror of the familiar
I was sitting at my desk on an ordinary Tuesday when it happened. The world had settled into its usual white noise—the distant hum of traffic, the rhythmic drip of water somewhere in the house, the predictable dance of my daily routine. Nothing about the moment was remarkable. I could explain everything around me with surgical precision: why my laptop sat positioned just so, the logic behind my carefully optimized workspace, the familiar weight of my elbows resting on wood I'd grown to know by touch.
I was the silent master of my small domain, and everything was exactly as it should be.
Then, for reasons I still can't explain, I looked at my hands.
Not a casual glance, but a real look. The kind of attention that transforms the mundane into the uncanny. My hand lifted itself—no, was lifted, as if by some invisible puppeteer. I watched my fingers curl and uncurl, stretch and shiver. A foreign tingle spread across my palms.
These are parts of me, I thought, almost without words. These obey my commands, give me power, disappoint me when they fail. Yet they're not tools I can simply pick up and discard like my laptop or a hammer. They are parts in which I reside, which make up me.
But as I kept staring, something shifted. All the gravity of the universe seemed to focus on these ten fingers, these palms, these absurd objects at the end of my arms. And I realized: something about them didn't quite belong.
The longer I stared, the more they seemed to stare back. Not with eyes—there were no eyes—but with a presence both palpable and aloof, partially existent yet somehow not there at all. Time began to warp. The background drip of water suddenly thundered in the foreground—thump-thump—my heartbeat becoming an urgent reminder of the animal machinery keeping me alive.
Then it struck, like a predator that had been stalking me from within. Not approaching from behind or from the periphery, but surrounding me completely, pouncing from everywhere at once. The Question—[?]—arrived with each rushing heartbeat:
What am I, as living, thinking, feeling, speaking, rotting flesh? Who am I?
In that briefest of moments, I felt an intrusion—a vivid, ethereal strangeness. I had somehow intruded upon myself. An inner switch toggled and untoggled. I felt partially cast out of myself, yet remained myself. Everything changed while nothing changed at all.
The Horror of the Familiar
What happened to me that Tuesday wasn't unique. It's the existential equivalent of saying a word over and over until it becomes meaningless sound—except instead of a word, it was me becoming foreign to myself. Psychologists call this "semantic satiation," but they're missing the deeper terror: when the most familiar becomes radically strange, we glimpse the fundamental instability of everything we take for granted.
Your hands are always there, always yours, always obeying (mostly) your commands. They're so basic to your sense of embodied selfhood that you rarely think about them. But pay attention—really pay attention—and they become alien artifacts, these flesh-machines attached to your consciousness by mysterious threads.
This is what I call "the horror of the familiar"—that moment when the everyday world reveals its essential strangeness. It's not that reality becomes unreal, but that the real was always more alien than we dared to notice. We live most of our lives in a kind of existential sleepwalk, assuming we know what we are, where we are, why we're here. Then something—a glance at your hands, catching your reflection at 3am, hearing your voice on a recording—tears through that assumption like paper.
Kierkegaard understood this. He wrote that losing oneself "can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all." Unlike losing an arm, five dollars, or a relationship—losses that announce themselves—losing yourself happens silently. The world continues its pallid existence. Your tools and furniture remain where you left them. Everything appears objectively normal.
Yet nothing is as it's supposed to be.
Arc In The Book: Living the Question
In my upcoming book The Last Existential Crisis, I argue that this moment of estrangement isn't a bug in human consciousness—it's a feature. We're not broken for feeling foreign to ourselves; we're finally awake to our actual condition. The question "Who am I?" doesn't arise because we've lost something we once had. It emerges because we're confronting the truth that there was never anything solid to lose in the first place.
This is what I call the Vexed Question [?]—not just "Who am I?" but the deeper recognition that this question cannot be answered in any final way. We are questioning beings asking questions about our own questioning nature. We're acephalous creatures [/]—headless in the sense that we lack the central organizing principle that would make self-knowledge possible.
But here's where it gets interesting: this impossibility isn't the end of the story. It's where everything begins.
When you stare at your hands until they become foreign, you're not discovering a problem to be solved. You're encountering the creative tension that makes authentic existence possible. The gap between who you think you are and the mystery of what you actually are isn't a wound to be healed—it's the space where meaning gets made.
This is what I call "correspondence"—a way of living with questions rather than demanding they submit to answers. Like jazz improvisation, it's about responding to what emerges in the moment rather than following a predetermined script.
An Invitation to Correspond
I'm sharing this because I suspect you've had your own version of this moment. Maybe it wasn't hands. Maybe it was catching your reflection in a window and not immediately recognizing the person looking back. Maybe it was lying in bed and suddenly feeling the full weight of your existence pressing down on you. Maybe it was asking yourself a simple question and realizing you had no idea how to answer it.
These moments of recognition—when the familiar becomes uncanny—are invitations. Not to solve the mystery of selfhood, but to dance with it. To correspond with the question rather than foreclose it with easy answers.
Which leads into my question for you: When did you first feel like a stranger to yourself? Was it similar to mine—an ordinary moment that suddenly revealed its strangeness, when the familiar world shows its alien face?
I'm starting this correspondence to explore these territories together—the places where certainty dissolves and something more interesting begins. Because if we're going to be lost, we might as well be lost together, mapping the unmappable territory of what it means to be human.
This is the first in a series of correspondences based on my book "The Last Existential Crisis". The Last Existential Crisis is coming 2025. This Substack will share exclusive excerpts, behind-the-scenes insights, and ongoing correspondence about what it means to be human in an age of infinite, lossy answers. → HERE IS THE MANIFESTO.
What's Coming
Over the coming weeks, I'll be sharing insights from the book that explore:
Why staring at your own hands can trigger an existential crisis
Getting personal: from doubting pastor's kid to [?]
Civilisation, history, progress as an avoidance of the difficult questions
What happens when the theater of self-improvement finally collapses
Why nightmares are essential to sanity
Ultimate miscommunication in the form of the problem of suicide
What the jazz musician knows about authenticity that therapy does not