At a three-day golf outing at Seven Springs last month -- rife with the existential angst of decadent athletes wielding senescent muscles to advance a 1.75-inch sphere over the surface of an 8,000 mile sphere -- the conversation at one wine-drenched dinner inevitably turned to existentialism.

My friend Frank Haller noted that such non-philosophers as talk-show hosts, newspaper columnists, sportswriters and play-by-play announcers were increasingly finding "existential moments" in everything they covered. He wondered if any of them knew what existentialism really is.

He has a point. When Frank and I were in college, existentialists were intellectuals like Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Albert Camus -- people who could find no point or purpose in human existence.

Now, you have people like Simon Doonan, creative director of Barneys New York, suggesting suitable gifts for three personality types -- the gypsy, the socialite and the existentialist. (That's all? Which one goes to NASCAR races?) Mr. Doonan thinks the existentialist likes art and recommends a polka-dot cup and saucer as a gift, or a striped Bolivian shawl.

"Can you define existentialism?" Frank asked me. I said I wouldn't even if I could. A challenge to define a term is always a trap, and I had played out of enough traps for one day.

None of the golfers at our outing was French (though some were actively supporting the Free French of Bordeaux that night) and only three had studied even a smattering of philosophy except for the kind dispensed at management seminars. (Think outside the box. Change is not what it used to be. Only the paranoid survive.)

Four of the participants were hampered in their efforts to characterize existentialism by their inability to pronounce it. (This may have been the voice of Bordeaux, which silences the "x.") Another had spent two years in a Jesuit seminary learning that Sartre, Camus and de Beauvoir were the Axis of Evil.

In order to resolve this matter and get back to telling bawdy jokes, the group decided that I would write a piece about existentialism on my blog and they would all read it someday. Thus did they take on a self-defining individual responsibility which -- given the demands of their existence between being and nothingness -- they are unlikely to fulfill.

The first principle to note, I wrote, is that French existentialists write thin books, and German existentialists write fat ones. This is because resveratrol, the ingredient in red wine that supports cardiovascular health even among people who eat pate de foie gras, also causes flat chests and astringent prose. Then too, people who take three hours to eat dinner don't have much time left to write thick books.

This is not to make light of existential dread. To a long line of European philosophers from Plato and Aristotle down through Thomas Aquinas and Descartes, it is not the existence, but the essence -- the fundamental nature -- of a person or a thing that matters. To many such thinkers, this underlying nature was determined by the Almighty, so the individual could turn to religion to learn about God's plan and then spend his life trying to fulfill it. A questionable deal, perhaps, but not at all confusing.

Such philosophers might scratch their large heads to hear that a baseball manager is having an existential dilemma over whether or not to yank the pitcher. They would marvel at cocktail party chatter between people who say they're seeing an existential therapist.

The philosophers at our golf outing all had enjoyed successful careers, cunningly exploiting some of the most exploitative corporations in America from their outposts at various advertising agencies. They had happily shrugged off the existentialist's fixation with dread, boredom and alienation and had reveled in absurdity rather than trembling in fear of it. They assumed human destiny was a matter of providing for your family (being) but living it up when you're out of town (nothingness).

And through all this time, the word existential was quietly creeping into common parlance, insidiously facilitated by Woody Allen's film dialogues, so that now the first definition of "existential" in the dictionary is, "pertaining to human existence." A very broad, nay, inescapable category.

Assuming you're human, from now on everything you do will be an existential act.