Mel and Bucky have a brief conversation on Søren Kierkegaard, who is arguably the father of existentialism. If you don't study philosophy, Bucky mentions a main tenet in the film, and says it's up to individuals to assign value to their lives. Kierkegaard was the only major existentialist who was also a theist, but he rejected what the church had become and insisted upon the active role of the individual to determine their role in their own reality. In order to achieve our potential through "self-shaping", we first need to come to "self-acceptance" which is entirely what this film is about. You can have deep, dark emotions, but we can't reject them or even beat ourselves up about it. Instead, we acknowledge and possibly embrace who we were, in order to become who we can be.

Yes, I was a philosophy major.