Existentialism supposes the meaning lives inside your head (so it is subjective, internal, and individual). This is also wrong. I will explain later why meanings logically can’t be subjective. They also can’t be individual: they are inherently social. Also, we don’t have perfectly free will to choose meanings. We are constrained by, and unavoidably depend upon, biology and society and culture.
...But existentialism conclusively failed half a century ago, so the word sounds quaint and dated, and most people who adopt it now don’t realize that’s what they are doing. Many think they’ve invented a clever personal philosophy—with no clue why it won’t work....If you seriously attempt existentialism, you will fail. You cannot create your own meanings.
Authenticity defines a condition on self-making: do I succeed in making myself, or will who I am merely be a function of the roles I find myself in? Thus to be authentic can also be thought as a way of being autonomous. In choosing “resolutely”—that is, in commiting myself to a certain course of action, a certain way of being in the world—I have given myself the rule that belongs to the role I come to adopt. The inauthentic person, in contrast, merely occupies such a role, and may do so “irresolutely,” without commitment.