Significant Life

For Camus, these feelings of pointless rhythms or of death’s inevitability are only the symptoms of the absurd. The absurd itself is something very precise. It is the confrontation of our need for meaning with the unwillingness of the universe to yield it to us. Humans need reasons; we need to know that there is some point to going on. The universe, however, is silent. It does not speak, or if it does, it is in a language we do not understand. It is not that there necessarily is no meaning. Perhaps there is. But if there is, it is inaccessible to us. Science might give us explanations. It might tell us why things are the way they are. But science does not yield meaning. That is not its job. And if we are to understand what the universe has on offer, where else could we turn?

The weight of the rhythm exhausts us, seems grinding where it once seemed natural, or didn’t seem like anything, just background noise. At the same time we are perplexed by this rhythm, by the fact that we never noticed, or even that it was there at all. The fact of our being here, having gone through these motions for all these years without having noticed their pointlessness, grips us at the same time it bears down upon us

The French philosopher Albert Camus writes of something similar which he calls a feeling of the absurd. “It happens that the stage sets collapse. Rising, streetcar, four hours in the office or the factory, 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 then one day the ‘why’ arises and everything begins in that weariness tinged with amazement.”