To embrace the absurd, to be human
Existence, well what does it matter?
I exist on the best terms I can
— ‘Heart and Soul’ by Joy Division
. . .
Existentialists ask what it all means.
Nihilists say it all means nothing.
Absurdists say it all means nothing, yet we can’t help trying to attach something deeper to it.
My own outlook on life has followed this same path.
In my early years, I pondered the meaning of life, a silly question for one yet to experience much of anything. Then, after the deaths of my parents, I flirted with nihilism, which I eventually put aside, not because the belief structure was untrue, but because it didn’t serve me. And then, sometime during the COVID-19 pandemic, I shifted to absurdism, where I still stand at the time of writing this post.
On a long enough timeline, the events of your life don’t matter. That’s where nihilism stops. Absurdism, on the other hand, acknowledges the futility of it all, while also acknowledging the desire and need for something more.
Why would anyone acknowledge this struggle? Because, at the end of the day, that struggle is all we have. That struggle is the source of meaning.
Everything we hold dear—our families, our vocations, our friends—will be forgotten in time. In less than the blink of the cosmic eye, everything we hold dear will be gone. So why bother? Again, this is all we have. We can lament that this is as good as it gets, or we can embrace it.
What’s the alternative? To wade in the waters of waste? You can spend your days however you want. But I hope you choose to spend them in a way that might let you and those around you smile from time to time, even if the source of that joy be delusion.
Anything is pointless if you spend all your time thinking about it, something I wish the rationalists could figure out. Sure, you can laugh at all the ways we fall in love with silly shiny things. Or you can accept that, for better or for worse, humans are little more than highly-evolved apes.
If you stop and think about it, sex is one of the most ridiculous concepts of our world. (To keep this blog family-friendly, I won’t elaborate on the mechanics and will instead trust you to fill in the details on your own.) But it’s been crucial for the persistence of our species, as well as so many others.
Albert Camus concludes the essay ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’ with this simple line:
One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
Sisyphus was damned by the gods to a lifetime of rolling a boulder up a hill, only for the boulder to roll down and for him to start the process over again. So, how can one imagine Sisyphus happy? Because that damn boulder is all he has. What’s the alternative?
I once heard someone criticize ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’ by saying that Camus basically tacked that last point onto the end. I won’t argue with the criticism, but I will say the point of the last line resonated with me as I realized we are all pushing our own boulder up the hill, over and over and over again. No matter how we feel about it, the boulder’s here to stay. We might as well embrace whatever we can.
In Man’s Search for Meaning, Victor Frankenstein describes how, as a prisoner in a concentration camp, he helped others maintain morale through the Holocaust, despite his own family having already died in the camps. One might argue that Frankel’s loss shows it all means nothing, that his previous experiences and sacrifices were nullified by their deaths. Or they could say it was absurd of him to find any meaning at all after losing his family to something as senseless as genocide. There’s no question Frankel was dealt a terrible hand. But he did amazing things regardless.
Some may disregard absurdism on the very basis of its absurdity. But to ignore the existence of absurdity is the greatest form of absurdism. Anyone who’s spent time with other humans knows we don’t default to rationality. To ignore the absurdism within us is to ignore a crucial part of what it means to be human. How can one ever hope to understand or improve the human condition without first understanding the human condition? And how can one understand the human condition without first accepting the existence of absurdism without our nature? If you ignore this basic part of humans, how well can you understand them? And if you’re unable to understand these universal truths within us all, can you ever hope to find the truths buried within yourself? Can you ever know your own heart and soul?
If you discovered tomorrow that we were all living in a simulation, would that make your life and your connections meaningless? I’d argue that it changes nothing. While what you have may, in some way, be unreal, it’s in fact real by the fact it’s all you have. The absurdist notion of needing meaning means that within this fake existence is your only hope to find meaning. If anything, your situation now means more than it did before, because while there may be something else somewhere out there, your consciousness exists only within this simulation. So, your digital family and your digital friends and your digital dog—all just a series of binaries—are still as good as it will ever get for you. Because when the lights go off, that’s it.
Poof.
Absurd? Yeah.
Depressing? Only if you expect something more.
Jake LaCaze is working to embrace the absurdism of life.
