A critical claim in existentialist thought is that individuals are always free to make choices and guide their lives toward their own chosen goal or "project." The claim hold that individuals cannot escape this freedom, even in overwhelming circumstances. For instance, even an empire's colonized victims possess choices: to submit to rule, to negotiate, to act in complicity, to commit suicide, to resist nonviolently, or to counter-attack.
Although external circumstances may limit individuals, they cannot force a person to follow one of the remaining courses over another. In this sense the individual still has freedom of choice. For this reason, individuals choose in anguish: they know that they must make a choice, and that it will have consequences. For Sartre, to claim that one amongst many conscious possibilities takes undeniable precedence (for instance, "I cannot risk my life, because I must support my family") is to assume the role of being an object in the world, rather than a subject or a free agent.
Sartre asserts that even when I don't choose, then I preferred not to choose, and it is still a choice. Thus, for example, on election day, whether you like it or not, you choose how to be. Whether by ballot or by a white slip of abstention from voting, or if you choose with your feet not to show up or not to reach for the ballot, you still choose a "non-choice." This choice is our humanity, continues Sartre, and it is our fate as human beings that we will always live in a state of freedom and choices, even when we do not wish to.
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