It’s a change of perspective. A normie would look at a blank canvas and see it as meaningless and empty. An artist would look at it and see the potential to create his own art, his own meaning, in it. In both cases, the canvas is still empty and meaningless, and art too is inherently meaningless outside of the meaning we as humans give to it. But the perspective of the artist is the existentialist perspective, while that of the normie is the typical nihilist perspective.

The reason to believe in it is that you believe is the truth, however scary and uncomfortable it is. I have more or less agreed with Sartre on the nature of reality since I was 10 years old. It is not pleasant, but I truly believe that it is how things are. As for transcending it through art, as at the end of Nausea when our protagonist enjoys a song written by two Jews and sung by a negress who are probably all dead or ailing by the time of writing, it is basically just a cope. Sartre offers up art and political conviction as two ways to "transcend death and the absurdity of existence" but never really makes either sound truly satisfying. Existence is terrifying and meaningless, and the void is incomprehensibly terrible. And we are all doomed to it! Enjoy!

>>18481079
That's not really what existentialism is about, you don't "pretend" it has meaning, you find your own meaning without having it prescribed to you and accept that you're "doomed to be free" without clear guidelines as pic rel said.

>>18481079
The reason isn’t a “logical” one, it is an existential one. Faced with the meaninglessness of the material world and the absence of a supernatural world that gives you absolute meaning, what do you do? Do you choose to give in to a nihilistic worldview and embrace the inner doomer, do you instead say “this is fine” like a smiling Sisyphean absurdist, or do you instead see it as a blank slate to start making your own meaning like the existentialist?

Of course, if it so happened that the material world did have intrinsic meaning, or that there was a supernatural world with entities that provided you with meaning, existentialism, nihilism and absurdism fall apart. The former is true in utopian socialism (not the same as Marxism as their socialism is brutalist, kek) and materialist forms of Stoicism and Spinozism, while the latter is true in basically all religion. Sartre did fuse his existentialism and Marxism somewhat towards the end of his career, which made the meaninglessness as less of an assumption vaguely pointing at science, and rather something that springs naturally from historical materialism and science explicitly.