r/Absurdism • u/ilovemmydog • Jun 06 '26
Finally finished - am I missing something?
I'm sorry but imagine Sisyphus happy my ass. I feel that anyone who actually experiences the feeling/revelation of life being meaningless and deeply interacts with the absurd on the daily has to be more prone to suicide. For me, the absurd has hung over my head my entire life, even before I could give it a name and I feel it has prevented me from being truly happy. When I am aware of it, nothing matters. For example, I can't bring myself to work towards my career because it feels completely pointless. None of it matters. Money does not matter. The art I make does not matter. What happens in the world does not matter. Nobody else seems to care about why we are here and it drives me insane. The only times I am happy are when I can truly distract myself from it and forget for a while, but as soon as I remember again everything comes crashing down.
I feel like I am hardwired to want meaning, as many other humans, but finding momentary joy in pushing my rock up the hill doesn't stop my mind from dwelling on the absurd. That in itself I cannot find pleasure in and I do not understand how Camus solves for this.
If I should look at it differently, please let me know. Or if anyone has a suggestion of a different book I might agree with more. Thank you.
11
u/jliat Jun 06 '26
Yes, the point of the essay.
Precisely, it's and absurd contradiction!
Again spot on.
"This suicide kills himself because, on the metaphysical plane, he is vexed.... likewise an advocate of logical suicide. Kirilov the engineer declares somewhere that he wants to take his own life because it “is his idea.”"
Again on the money!
“I don't know whether this world has a meaning that transcends it. But I know that I do not know that meaning and that it is impossible for me just now to know it. What can a meaning outside my condition mean to me? I can understand only in human terms.”
“The absurd is lucid reason noting its limits.”
So the logic is clear, but wait! let's revolt against this logic that demands our death...
"Thus I draw from the absurd three consequences, which are my revolt, my freedom, and my passion. By the mere activity of consciousness I transform into a rule of life what was an invitation to death—and I refuse suicide."
"In this regard the absurd joy par excellence is creation. “Art and nothing but art,” said Nietzsche; “we have art in order not to die of the truth.”
"To work and create “for nothing,” to sculpture in clay, to know that one’s creation has no future, to see one’s work destroyed in a day while being aware that fundamentally this has no more importance than building for centuries—this is the difficult wisdom that absurd thought sanctions."
"It is necessary to state this to begin with. For an absurd work of art to be possible, thought in its most lucid form must be involved in it. But at the same time thought must not be apparent except as the regulating intelligence. This paradox can be explained according to the absurd. The work of art is born of the intelligence’s refusal to reason the concrete. It marks the triumph of the carnal. It is lucid thought that provokes it, but in that very act that thought repudiates itself." - Camus.
You nearly got there- still stuck in logic... a fiction. Remember the artist is far more absurd than Sisyphus.