Anyone with an ombré of seemingly self-regarding IQ eventually runs into Camus. Some of us meet him early, maybe in our teenage years, in that awkward, edgy phase where big dreams collide with pragmatic reality. We become a confusing blend of idealist and realist, hoping to reconcile ambition with limits. Reading Camus then feels respectable. It signals depth (or misinterpretation). A desire for something more. Or perhaps something hidden. Meaning, destiny, coherence.

And when we’re older, many of us return. This time with sharper eyes, heavier experiences, maybe detouring through existentialism, nihilism, or adjacent philosophies along the way.

Except Camus refuses meaning.

Not just shallow meaning, but all deeper, ultimate meaning. He places it in the realm of the unknowable and refuses to let life’s task be the pursuit of it. Why? Because despite all our efforts, the universe offers nothing in return. It remains silent. Indifferent. Vast.

But Camus did not despair. And we shouldn’t either. Absurdism isn’t about hopelessness or resignation. For Camus, the clash between our longing for clarity and the universe’s indifference is not an ending. It is a beginning.

What is the Absurd?

You may not have read about it, but i’m certain you have felt it. The absurd does not announce its arrival. It strikes without warning, not something you study, but as something you feel. When suffering arrives without reason. When death intrudes without permission. When life simply fails to answer.

I once took a philosophy module where the prof joked that history is full of sad thinkers. He said the most depressed of them all, perhaps, was the French journalist Albert Camus.
Strange. Why? He had everything. Looks, fame, talent, lovers. What went wrong? Did he get bored?

But the absurd is not simply boredom. It is the moment when routines of life suddenly feel hollow as if it might collapse at any time. It could be any day, really, you wake up as usual, ride the same train, exchange the same pleasantries, but suddenly wonder why you’re doing all this.

Camus calls this moment a “weariness tinged with amazement”. The machinery of habit grinds to a halt.

We humans need purpose, coherence and meaning. But the universe does not. It simply offers the brute facts of existence, mountains, streams, time, stars, heat, silence.

And it is in this disparity, between our hunger for meaning and the world’s indifference, that the absurd is born.

Camus did not set out to answer this question with metaphysics or illusion. He confronted it directly, without flinching, without appeal to higher power or convenient covers. What matters is not what the world refuses to give us, but what we choose to do in the face of that refusal.

This is not defeat. This is a rebellion.

Revolt Without Illusion

Camus avoids the two familiar consolations. He does not retreat into religion with its promise of eternal design, nor embrace nihilism which strips the world of all value.

To Camus, living with the absurd is to face reality as it is, and still say yes. But do not confuse this with optimism. It is simply honesty.

At the centre of this philosophy, stands Sisyphus, the mythical king condemned by the Gods to push a boulder up a mountain, only for it to roll back down, for enternity. Meaningless, cruel, unbearable.

But then, Camus asks us to imagine the descent. What if, in those moments walking back down the slope, Sisyphus becomes conscious? What if he sees the absurdity of his own fate yet chooses it anyway?
Then, Camus says, he is stronger than the Gods.

His rebellion lies not in changing his condition, but in refusing to let it break his spirit. He becomes free, not by escaping the rock, but by seeing clearly, and willingly continue. This is Camus’ Prototype of the Absurd Hero. One who doesn’t conquer death or uncovers hidden meaning but walks straight into the void and keeps walking.

Joy here, is not born out of illusion but out of defiance. Each day he faces the same futile task, and still finds it within himself to say yes.

Not Existentialism

Existentialism seeks to create meaning. It presents itself as elegant, refined, self-empowering even, but to Camus, it remains an illusory escape. Briefly, below is what I’ve gathered from Camus’ critique of the major schools of thought:

“Existence precedes essence,” Sartre writes. We invent ourselves through action. But the universe remains indifferent. Our invented meanings simply replace one illusion with another, and are just as fragile and will dissolve with us.

Søren Kierkegaard, the father of Christian Existentialism, a man so tormented by the unknown he saw clearly the despair that reason alone cannot explain. But his solution was the leap of faith, a surrender to the unknowable. Camus respects the honesty of his anguish, but refuses the leap. To abandon reason the very moment it reaches its limit is philosophical betrayal. Suicide of the mind.

Nietzsche burns brighter. But even that prophet of fire and will offers no respite. He demands value-creation in a godless world. But the Nietzschean will risks turning revolt into domination, and freedom into force. Indeed, while he never advocated cruelty, it didn’t stop the Nazis from twisting and distorting his concept of the Übermensch from its original meaning of self-overcoming to justify Aryan supremacy and extermination.

Camus wants none of this. He wants honesty.

What Camus Wants of Us

Not belief, but revolt.
Not certainty, but clarity.

Accept life without redemption or justification. And still say yes. Not because it is noble, but because it is honest. To lie, even for comfort, is to lose the absurd.

Camus does not ask us to leap into meaning. Others do. Some leap into faith, surrendering reason at the moment it becomes unbearable. Others invent meaning through action or self-definition, hoping creation will soften indifference. Even nihilism is a kind of leap, an escape into negation.

Camus refuses all of them. He stands still, watches the horizon, stares into the waves, and does not blink. Not because he expects an answer to rise, but because looking away and avoiding it would be a form of betrayal. And in that refusal, he finds freedom.

His absurd portraits in the The Myth of Sisyphus — Don Juan, the Actor, the Conqueror — are not ideals to imitate, but attitudes toward existence.

Don Juan says yes to love as something to be lived rather than promised. He loves intensely and repeatedly, without pretending it leads to anything lasting, even though it often leaves others hurt.

The Actor says yes to creation. He lives many lives on stage, fully aware that each one disappears the moment the performance ends, and creates anyway. He knows they are all masks but what matters is intensity, not eternity. He burns bright, but not long.

The Conqueror says yes to action in a world that offers no guarantees. He chooses to act rather than wait for meaning, even when that decisiveness turns harsh or ruthless. He knows history has no final justice and his victories will vanish, but he acts anyway because paralysis is another form of surrender.

None of them hope for salvation. None seek consolation. They are not deceived by the dream of Heaven nor the abyss of Nihilism. But they do not surrender either. They say yes to experience, not because it is pure or eternal, but because it is there, and possibly all that there is.

A Note on The Stranger

This is a different book, but it completes Camus’ exploration of the absurd and what it means to live honestly within it. I like The Stranger because it is, at its core, a book about honesty. One musn’t delulu oneself.

Meursault, the main character, is an ordinary man who reacts to life without the emotions society expects of him. When his mother dies, he feels no visible grief. He does not cry. He does not perform mourning. Later, he kills a man, not out of hatred or malice, but in a moment shaped by heat, sun, exhaustion, and circumstance rather than intent.

He is eventually put on trial for murder, but it becomes clear that he is condemned not so much for the act itself. What then is Meursault’s true crime?
Honesty.

Camus makes this uncomfortable on purpose.

Meursault does not lie about what he feels. He does not pretend to experience emotions he does not have. And this, more than the killing itself, becomes his true crime.

At trial, he is judged less for taking a life than for failing to grieve properly, for not fitting the emotional script society demands. His honesty is read as coldness. His clarity, as monstrosity.

Eventually, Meursault accepts his condition. He realises the world has never promised him meaning, but it has offered him the sun, the sea, the physical immediacy of existence. And perhaps that is enough.

This is an extreme case, of course. Most of us are spared such tests since we feel empathy, guilt, sorrow. But Camus forces the question anyway:
If you do not feel what is expected of you, should you fake it? Conform? Perform grief or remorse simply because it is required?

And if you refuse, what is your real crime? Failing to act the way others want you to?

Closing

Camus’ figures are easy to dismiss. The seducer. The tyrant. The murderer.

But beneath them lies lucidity. A refusal to flinch. Can we condemn them? Maybe. Dostoevsky certainly would. He warned us about the dangers of stripping belief bare, of over-rationalization, of how intricate reasoning can easily be used to justify moral descent.

But Camus is asking something simpler, and arguably harder.

See the world as it is.
Refuse illusion.
And still say yes.