“Rising, streetcar, four hours in the office or the factory, meal, streetcar, four hours of work, meal, sleep, and Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday and Saturday according to the same rhythm. This path is easily followed most of the time. But one day the “why” arises and everything begins in hat weariness tinged with amazement.”
- Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

“Is life meaningless?” A question so grand in depth to warrant an answer, yet something that many, if not all of us have asked ourselves at least once in our lifetime. This was no different for Albert Camus, the Nobel Prize-winning French philosopher best known for his literary works; The Stranger, The Plague, The Myth of Sisyphus, and The Fall.

Camus theorized that humans have an inherent urge to understand how the world works–the who, what, when, where, why, and how’s of life. Yet what we often fail to realize is that in the grand scheme of the universe, it’s essentially unreasonable for one to strive to not only understand but find meaning and inherent value in life. To this, Camus presents us with two choices. The first choice is to simply deny the unreasonability in understanding life, and believe that one has a deliberate reason for living–in simpler terms, gaslighting yourself into believing that you know what you’re doing with your life. The second choice would be to ‘live with the absurd’, as Camus puts it. While accepting the meaninglessness of life and the incomprehensibility of it, rather than falling into a pit of despair, Camus believed that a meaningless universe is actually an opportunity to free ourselves and experience existence to the fullest extent.

In Camus’s most well-known novel, The Stranger (Originally L'Étranger), he tells the story of Meursault, a man who goes through trial for murdering another man. At a glance, Meursault almost strikes as a sociopath, devoid of any emotion or empathy. He is completely unmoved and unaffected by his mother’s death, expresses little to no affection to his lover, kills a man without much reason, and even shows no emotional response when his death sentence is announced. He is completely detached from society–perhaps, like a stranger. Meursault is a clear depiction of the absurdity Camus is best known for, as seen by his indifference in response to the meaninglessness of life. Yet, he is also the absurd man who is yet to embrace the absurdity of life the way Camus tells us to. So if Meursault fails to embrace the absurd, what does an absurd man living life fully look like?

I had the exact same question when I finished The Stranger earlier this week. Although I was aware of what absurdism is on a surface level, I didn’t know whether or not to see Meursault as a prime example of an absurd man. Accepting the fact that life has inherent value is quite exactly what Meursault was doing in the book, yet his life was not in any way virtuous or even moral at the very minimum. Was this really what Camus wants us all to be like?

The answer is simple. Not really. With a deeper understanding of Camus’ philosophy, I soon realized that an absurd man–an absurd hero, as he puts it–is one that accepts the meaninglessness, the absurdity of life, yet sees the silver lining. When there’s no point in living this life, instead of looking at some ultimate goal or a purpose in it all, it means all our focus can be driven solely in this very life that we are living. Rejecting the hope for a greater future, and instead embracing the lucid experience of what’s happening in the moment. It’s the ultimate carpe diem, it’s how to suck the marrow out of life, it’s how you truly seize the day–because tomorrow has no meaning. Perhaps the 20th century French philosopher’s magnum-opus of a theory is after all what’s most needed in the modern world, a world where it is so easy to get lost in the turbulence of the 9-to-5 life that we often forget to question the “why” of it all.

“To live solely with what he knows, to accommodate himself to what is and to bring in nothing that is not certain. He is told that nothing is. But this at least is a certainty…it’s possible to live without appeal.”
- Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus