Before I even begin, I think I should give credit to the inspiration behind all of the random writing below: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existentialism

Philosophy beings with questioning yourself, and so does this:
Does the new age philosophy have anything worth offering us in this new century? When is too late? When is it that you lose the ability to make something of yourself? Are we losing the real virtues of living life passionately? Are we not responsible for who we are?

I think we’re forgetting how to feel good about life. Existentialism is often discussed as if it's a philosophy of despair. But I think the truth is just the opposite. Kanou once said she never really felt a day of despair in his life. It is not a sense of anguish about life so much as a real kind of exuberance of feeling so much bigger than all of it. It's like your life is yours to create. I want to read these postmodernists with some interest, even admiration. Because when I read the older philosophers, like Karl Marx, Nietzsche etc., I always have this awful nagging feeling that something absolutely essential is getting left out. As if those philosophers can never know what we went through, and they’d never know how much the society has changed today, and what they say, is although true, but not as applicable as it was during those golden olden days.

And when we, as people talk about responsibility, we’re never talking about something abstract. We never get philosophical about responsibility. It's always something very concrete, something tangible. It's you and me talking. Making decisions. Doing things and taking the consequences. There are six billion people in the world and counting. Nevertheless, what you do makes a difference. It makes a difference, first of all, in material terms. Makes a difference to other people and it sets an example. In short, I think the message here is that we should never simply write ourselves off and see ourselves as the victim of various forces. It's always our decision to choose what we are, who we are.