Albert Camus on Finding Joy in an Absurd Life

The workman of today leads an absurd life. He works tirelessly to accomplish an assigned list of tasks each day, only to repeat this process the next day, and the next, until he either retires or ceases to live any more. How can we possible derive any vestige of joy or meaning from such a mundane and miserable routine?

French philosopher Albert Camus seeks to answer this question in his essay The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), translated into English by Justin O’ Brien. The underlying message of this essay was inspired by the Greek mythology of Sisyphus, the founder and king of Ephyra. For cheating and escaping death, Sisyphus was condemned by Zeus to ceaselessly rolling a boulder to the top of a mountain, only to see it roll back down each time he reached the top. It was thought that this eternal hopeless struggle was the most dreadful and wretched punishment ever inflicted upon any mortal.

But Camus begged to differ.

The divorce between man’s irrational and wild longing for clarity and the unreasonable silence of our world is makes our lives absurd. But we can still imbue our lives with a sense of purpose through our revolt, for it is one of our only coherent philosophical positions in the face of absurdism. Living keeps the flame of the absurd burning. It’s in our consciousness and in our everyday defiance of the absurd that we afford life with meaning.

And this is why suicide should never be an option. Because by prematurely ending one’s life:

Everything is over and man returns to his essential history. His future, his unique and dreadful future—he sees and rushes toward it. In its way, suicide settles the absurd. It engulfs the absurd in the same death.

The absurd, however, only exists when we are alive. The trinity of man, his world and the absurd cannot be divided. Destroying one of its elements —  in this case, ourselves — is to destroy the whole. The absurd is an extreme tension binding our actions and the world that transcends them, and can only be maintained constantly by our solitary efforts. It’s through living that we can continue to wage this struggle against the inevitable, the incomprehensible and the futility of our actions.

More importantly, it’s also in this struggle where we find happiness. Happiness and the absurd are inseparable. As Camus writes:

It would be a mistake to say that happiness necessarily springs from the absurd discovery. It happens as well that the feeling of the absurd springs from happiness.

Every action we take is a brush of color that we paint onto the canvas of our fate. Though death shall soon seal our fate, we are for now the masters of our days. This sudden recognition of one’s agency in life is not only joyful, but liberating. No external force, and even the Gods, can control our consciousness, the single most crucial element that can either torture us or set us free. It is in recognizing this, that Sisyphus can find joy in his not-so-cruel fate after all. And that you too can attain profound meaning and depth in your personal life, regardless of how absurd our circumstances are.