Case Study 1: The Dropout

The Situation

Three years into a biomedical sciences PhD program at a well-regarded research university, Priya sits in her advisor's office and pretends to be engaged in a conversation about statistical methods for her second chapter.

She is not engaged. She has not been engaged for two and a half years. She knows this with a certainty she has never been able to admit to anyone directly.

The program was her parents' dream — both physicians, deeply invested in the narrative of their daughter's academic distinction, which already includes a gold medal at her undergraduate institution and a publication in a respected journal (her advisor's work, her name third on a six-person list). They contributed substantially to her undergraduate costs; they have repeatedly told her that the PhD is an investment in her future, which is also their future in the way they frame it.

The art is the thing she doesn't talk about. She has a studio apartment; the studio part is accurate. Large-scale mixed media: wire, found objects, projected text, sound. She has shown twice at a small gallery in the arts district, under a name no one from the department would connect to her. The shows were not financially successful. They were artistically serious, and the handful of serious people who came said serious things about them.

She has been telling herself the following story: I will finish the PhD because I have no choice. The investment is too large to abandon. My family has given too much. I am not talented enough as an artist to make a living at it. I can do the academic work; I have always done what was required. I will find a way to make peace with the research career. Perhaps I will do bioethics, something closer to meaning. Perhaps it will feel different when I have my own lab.

Her therapist — whom she sees secretly, paying out of pocket — has gently noted that she uses the phrase "I have no choice" approximately six times per session.

The Philosophical Analysis

Sartre: Bad Faith and the Two Forms

Priya's self-description is a paradigm of what Sartre calls bad faith. The sentence "I have no choice" is, for Sartre, almost always a lie — and it is precisely the lie that bad faith is designed to maintain.

Denying transcendence. The first form of bad faith involves treating yourself as a thing — a being-in-itself — that is fully determined by its past, its circumstances, its role. "I am the kind of person who finishes things I've started." "I am my family's investment." "I am a PhD student." These descriptions treat Priya as though her character, her obligations, and her role exhausted what she is. But she is a being-for-itself: a consciousness that is never fully contained in any description, that always transcends its facticity toward possibilities not yet chosen.

The material facts — the money spent, the years invested, the family expectations — are real. But they are facticity, not destiny. They constrain her choices; they do not eliminate them. The claim "I have no choice" converts real constraints into fake necessities, turning what is a difficult choice into the appearance of an absence of choice. This is the self-deception that relieves the anguish of freedom by pretending the freedom isn't there.

Denying facticity. Interestingly, Priya also shows the second form of bad faith in a subtler way: when she says "perhaps I will find a way to make peace with the research career," she is denying the facticity of her actual experience. She has been in this program for three years and has not found peace. The "perhaps" sustains a fiction of future transformation that the evidence of her experience does not support. She is treating the future as a magical realm where the present difficulties will dissolve — which is its own form of bad faith.

The anguish that bad faith evades. If Priya were to face her situation honestly, she would have to feel what Sartre calls anguish: the awareness that she is responsible for what happens next, that there is no obligation so powerful as to relieve her of the choice, that choosing to stay and choosing to leave are both her choices and she cannot blame either on her parents, her investment, or her obligations. The anguish would be real. The bad faith is a response to that anticipated anguish — a way of not having to feel it by pretending the choice doesn't exist.

Heidegger: Authenticity and das Man

Heidegger offers a different but complementary analysis. Priya is living, with remarkable completeness, in das Man — the anonymous social world of expectations and conventions that tells her what one does in her situation.

What does one do when one has performed well academically since childhood, when one comes from a family of professionals, when one has been offered and accepted a prestigious position? One continues. One does not throw it away for art. One is not that kind of person; one is responsible, serious, realistic. This is the voice of das Man, and Priya has so thoroughly internalized it that she can barely hear the call of conscience beneath it.

The call of conscience, in Heidegger's account, does not say "become an artist." It does not give instructions. It simply calls Priya back to herself — to the fact that she is the one who has to live this life, that she is the one who will sit through another decade of seminars and grant applications and faculty politics, that her existence is at stake in a way no one else's is. Being-toward-death intensifies this: whatever years she has are hers, and the question "Am I living the life I am choosing?" cannot be indefinitely deferred.

Heidegger would resist the assumption that the authentic choice is obviously "leave the program and make art." Authenticity is not a particular decision; it is a mode of making decisions. Priya could authentically choose to stay in the PhD — but she would do so as a genuine choice, with full awareness of what she is choosing and what she is giving up, rather than as something that simply happens because she has no alternative. The question is not "what should she do?" but "is she the author of whatever she does?"

Beauvoir: Situated Freedom and the Coerced Dimension of Bad Faith

Beauvoir would agree with Sartre that Priya is in bad faith but would insist on something Sartre's account underweights: the social dimension of her bad faith is not simply chosen but structurally produced.

Priya is the child of immigrants whose social capital is heavily invested in her academic achievement. She is a woman in a field where women still face significant structural barriers and where the "woman who abandoned her PhD for art" is a predictable narrative — one that will be read differently than the same choice made by a male colleague. The expectations imposed on her have specific gendered dimensions: the "good daughter," the "responsible choice," the suspicion that women are less serious about research careers. These are not simply pressures she can decide to ignore; they are part of the material and social conditions that shape what freedom even looks like in her situation.

Beauvoir would also ask: who benefits from Priya's bad faith? Her parents, certainly. Her advisor, who depends on her labor. The program, which has invested in her as a research instrument. Bad faith that serves others' interests is not simply individual weakness — it is structurally produced and reinforced.

This does not absolve Priya. Beauvoir's analysis does not eliminate individual responsibility; it complicates it. Priya is free — but her freedom is genuinely conditioned by social structures that make some choices easier and others nearly unthinkable. The question "what would authentic existence look like?" cannot be answered without accounting for those conditions.

Key Philosophical Questions

Is staying in the program bad faith? It depends on whether Priya is staying as a genuine choice — with full awareness of what she is choosing and giving up — or as a fiction of necessity. If she can say honestly "I choose to stay because [specific reasons I genuinely endorse]," she is not in bad faith. If she stays because she cannot bring herself to face the anguish of choosing to leave, she is in bad faith regardless of which choice would have been wiser.

Is leaving authentic freedom or just impulse? Leaving could be authentic — a genuine choice based on honest self-knowledge, owning the consequences. Or it could be its own form of bad faith — flight from the difficulty of commitment, romanticism about art that evades the real constraints of making a living as an artist. Authenticity is not the same as doing what you want; it is the mode in which you own your choices.

How do we distinguish authentic choice from mere rebellion? Rebellion — doing the opposite of what's expected simply because it's expected — is not authenticity. It is still defined by the expectation it rejects. Authentic choice is made from your own ground, not in reaction to anyone else's agenda. The test might be: is this choice one I would make if no one were watching, if there were no audience for my rebellion, if the social stakes of staying and leaving were perfectly symmetrical?

What role does her social situation play? Beauvoir insists this is not merely background noise. Priya's freedom is genuinely structured by her situation. A full existentialist analysis must acknowledge both her freedom (real, inalienable, always present) and the genuine material and social conditions that make exercising it more or less costly.

Discussion Questions

1. Does the amount of money and time already invested in a decision create a genuine moral obligation to continue, or is this the "sunk cost" fallacy dressed in moral language? How would Sartre analyze this?

2. Is there a version of staying in the PhD that would be genuinely authentic rather than bad faith? What would it look like? What would Priya have to actually know and decide for her continuation to be authentic?

3. Beauvoir argues that bad faith can be both individual and structurally produced. Does this change how we should morally evaluate Priya's situation? Is she culpable for her bad faith?

4. Heidegger says the call of conscience does not give instructions — it only calls you back to yourself. What does "back to yourself" mean for someone who has spent years constructing a self out of others' expectations?