Alex Sharpe, We’re Nobody’s Children: David Bowie and Existentialism – Counterpress, February 2026

This book brings existentialist philosophy (atheistic and Christian) to life through the artistic life of David Bowie. Working with Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and Simone Weil, it both explains different existentialist ideas (authenticity, anxiety, ethics, spirituality and death) and applies them to Bowie. In doing so, it sharpens our understanding of these ideas and of tensions both within existentialism and between it and some other philosophical approaches. In particular, it explores what it means to live an existentially authentic life, and it makes the case that Bowie, while he certainly ‘fell’ at times, can be understood as an exemplar of such a life. For David Bowie’s life and work can be read as a meditation on themes of alienation, loneliness, abandonment, fear, anxiety, meaninglessness, freedom and mortality.