Albert Camus: born in 1913 in French Algeria to European Colonists/Pied Noir. Father was killed in World War 1 and his mother was illiterate and half-deaf. Wanted to be a professional footballer (soccer, of course, not the American version) but was diagnosed with tuberculosis at age 17. Went to high school on a scholarship his elementary school teacher helped him get, and graduated college with a Bachelor’s Degree in philosophy. He married a morphine addict who constantly embarrassed him and slept with his friends, married a second time (even though he argued against marriage, claiming it was unnatural), became a journalist, joined the Algerian Communist party (even though he disagreed with communism), spent his life postulating on the meaning of life, and then died in a car crash in 1960. A life in a paragraph. How absurd.
As per Camus, “absurdism” is the frustration of people trying to find meaning in life, when life has no meaning. Absurdism is man’s futile search for a purpose in an unintelligible world devoid of values. Sounds pretty heavy, yes? He claimed that, “the absurd is born out of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world” (Myth of Sisyphus).
I have listened to the world’s unreasonable silence a million times. I have sat and thought and thought about the meaning of life and what I’m meant to do with my life and why the things which happen happen … and you know what? Camus was on to something. There is no point. All of my insomniatic staring at the ceiling at four a.m. has been for naught. I have never come to any life-changing revelations or discovered ways to reinvent the world – I always just wake up tired and a bit grumpy. Life has no intrinsic meaning, we never reach our goals, and life is filled with unavoidable, senseless tasks. Sounds depressing, and honestly it HAS been depressing to me for a long time, but I’ve decided to embrace it. If life is irrational and absurd, then so be it. I could get hit by a car today and die, and what would all of the thinking and worrying and wondering have accomplished? Nothing.
If Camus was right, and success is impossible (because, think about it, no matter what a person accomplishes, they generally immediately set a new goal to surmount), then the daily living of life must be the very point of breathing air. My purpose is whatever I want it to be. If I decide my purpose is to sit on the hammock and stare at the stars, then I should do it. Hoping for something MORE or something BETTER all the time is misery. Happiness is freedom from hope, because having hope means being uncertain.
For example, Camus’ The Stranger is a weird, uncomfortable story about a man who doesn’t seem to have any attachment to the world. His mother dies and he’s not really sad, just annoyed. When he’s looking at his mother’s coffin, he’s thinking about the screws in the wood and how fat the mourners are rather than thinking about his dead mom. Later the main character defends a pimp who beat his girlfriend for no other reason than that he can. He kills an Arab guy for looking at him. There seems to be no logic in any of it. This pointlessness in the story is, of course, the point.
In The Myth of Sisyphus, he is forced to roll a rock up a hill forever. Most people are forced to do Sisyphean tasks throughout life: we work in a cubicle, or commute to work, or mow our yards, or scrub the toilet. We rarely get satisfaction from the tasks, but we have to do them anyway. It’s absurd, and yet it’s these moments that make up the majority of our lives. IF we let them. IF we focus on them.
I disagree with Camus that the most important philosophical question is suicide. That’s morbid. Killing yourself is just as pointless as mowing the lawn. And at least with mowing, there’s a feeling of accomplishment, whereas if you’re dead … well, you’re dead. But accepting what IS, that should be enough in life. Trying to figure it all out (whatever “it” is) is a giant waste of time and mental energy.
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