I try to live authentically. I feel like I discovered what this meant when writing my honors thesis on 'Being and Time.' This process took nine months. During the process, I understood what Heidegger meant by "angst." Angst is the feeling that you must achieve something monumental, that you could fail at any moment, and that you are running out of time.

Authenticity, for me, was discovering the true meaning of this limited window of time. Authenticity, for me, means waking up every day and studying philosophy until the mid-afternoon, whether in school or not. It means having definite goals, not just "absorbing" bits and pieces of philosophy. It means reading the primary sources, trusting them alone, and using my own understanding rather than the understanding of a secondary source. It means not making a claim unless I can back it up with a text, not writing about positions or doctrines I don't understand, and only referring to primary sources and passages that I've read enough of to understand the context. It means making sure that I don't have any "spoilers" before reading a new text.

Heidegger also talks about how authenticity "closes" off other possibilities. For me, this meant putting a lot of my creative outlets aside. Before, I'd often written music, poetry, and sketched and painted. Although I can still do these things, I realized that I had to focus on just one of them: I chose writing philosophy as my creative outlet.

Heidegger also talks about "heroes." These are great people you want to imitate. You "retrieve" their possibilities from history, rather than merely following the average, everyday way of doing things. For me, this has meant looking at how the thinkers I admire were educated and trying to study the texts they studied.