>>2519
The minute I hear someone invoke the ad hominem fallacy, I automatically assume you are a stormnigger who throws around logical fallacies as though they will necessarily win every argument.
Anyways: Existentialism is objectively, demonstrably a pop philosophy on the basis that it is the only branch of philosophy that has enjoyed any popularity in popular media (muh Fite Club XDDD although I actually like that movie kek). And this is more or less the extent of its significance, aside from Sartre's influence on Focault and Simone de Beauvoir's influence on the feminist movement (which sadly has taken a turn for the worse; she must be rolling in her grave).
Existentialism itself is a worthless branch of philosophy because its content consists almost entirely in prescriptive claims about how to approach the human condition. Sartre blatantly stole from Heidegger - whose conceptualization of the idealistic plane that post-Kantian philosophy confines us to is, in my opinion, a brilliantly accurate one - and added to it that we all "create" meaning. But the very idea of "creating" meaning is as absurd as the concept of meaning itself - which in language is more or less impossible to locate (see Quine's "Ontological Relativity"), and which elsewhere is a pseudo-philosophical concept (the "meaning of life" - could there be any more a stereotypically "deep" question!?). It is not so much that humans can consciously create meaning or that we phenomenologically "create" meaning, so much as we are under the illusion of meaning which corresponds to absolutely nothing outside of us. And this is without even addressing the problems in developments since Existentialism that have been raised vis a vis post-structuralism, which would critique it on the basis that we do not create meaning so much as we regurgitate the historical and cultural circumstances we are thrown into. While we cannot help but believe that our words have a shared meaning or that our lives have purpose, much like we must believe we are free and act as if we are, in both cases we have no rights to these beliefs. They exist in our minds alone and on this basis any privileging of them in any philosophical system is patently idealistic - in the non-Kantian sense.
Basically, Existentialism took the Heideggerian rejection of an essential conflict between the real and the ideal (as an ontological conflict) and made gross and indefensible claims about our abilities within this idealistic sphere that nonetheless sounded very nice.
That isn't to say that Existentialism isn't a very inspiring body of works, or that literary Existentialists like Dostoevsky and Kafka aren't fantastic and important figures in the literary canon, but on the whole I think that Existentialism as a philosophical tradition is a dead-end. And at the end of it (for those who make it to the end and don't stay stuck in the naive, solipsistic belief that their existence has meaning because they create it phenomenologically, or the even more naive and delusional belief that they can consciously create meaning) is nihilism.