“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.”
—ALBERT CAMUS, Myth of Sisyphus, 1955
Life is absurd, and that’s okay. No one has written about this more eloquently than Albert Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus.11 The book, a classic in existential literature, derives its title from the legend of Sisyphus, the ancient Greek character who, having defied the gods, is meted an eternal punishment: he’s forever doomed to push a boulder up a mountain only to watch it roll down again, and then push it back up, ad infinitum. Camus considered Sisyphus to be a hero of the absurd, a kind of Phil Connors of Greek mythology. Phil Connors is the fictional television weatherman in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, from the film Groundhog Day, who tried everything, including suicide, to break up the monotony of his mundane existence. Without fail, however, Connors wakes to the same radio song in the same town, destined to follow the same meaningless trajectory of his life. He says, “I was in the Virgin Islands once. I met a girl. We ate lobster, drank piña coladas. At sunset we made love like sea otters. That was a pretty good day. Why couldn’t I get that day over and over again?” Who among us can’t empathize with this sentiment? Even on a good day, our lives often feel stuck on an endless loop.
Of course, as the author of your own life, you’re highly invested in it. Yet occasionally you might awaken to the possibility that from the point of view of the Universe, your life is tiny, accidental, and contains no particular value. The discrepancy between feeling that your life is highly valuable with the knowledge that you may not be able to justify that feeling is the notion of the absurd. Philosopher Todd May calls it “the confrontation of our need for meaning with the unwillingness of the Universe to yield it to us.”12 It’s the quandary that arises when you’re unable to articulate why your actions are worth doing or why your life is worth living. This happens when you lose touch with a framework—personal, familial, societal—that could tell you what is genuinely valuable.
This is what has increasingly happened to Western culture. In his classic analysis of American society, Habits of the Heart, sociologist Robert Bellah notes how the moral landscape of modern Americans has flattened into the preferences of self-interested individuals. So much so, in fact, that the ultimate goals of a good life have become a “matter of personal choice.”13 People no longer feel they’re guided by a solid cultural framework. Instead of knowing how to live you feel obliged to choose how to live. As Jean-Paul Sartre put it, “everything is permissible if God does not exist.”14
Consider this: A Gallup World Poll in 2007 surveyed more than 140,000 people from 132 different countries. Among its many questions was: “Do you feel your life has an important purpose or meaning?” When happiness or life satisfaction is examined on a large international scale, researchers typically find the same results again and again: richer nations—as measured by gross domestic product per capita—tend to have happier citizens than poorer nations.15 The opposite was true, however, when researchers compared answers to this Gallup Poll question. While 91 percent of the people across the world found meaning in their lives, people from wealthier nations like the United Kingdom, Denmark, France, and Japan were most prone to report that their life lacks a purpose or meaning, while in poorer nations like Laos, Senegal, and Sierra Leone virtually everyone saw that their life contains meaning.16 The wealthier countries where lack of meaning was more common were also countries with higher suicide rates.
For most of us, existential discomfort is a wave that washes over us quickly yet distinctly, leaving behind the impression, the sense, that perhaps life isn’t everything it’s cracked up to be, and then the morning alarm clock sounds. It’s another day, and you’re off to the races yet again. There’s a boulder, after all, that needs a good push. But there’s another way. It is possible to construct a worldview that can withstand the challenge of the absurd, one that’s not only compatible with what modern science tells us about the Universe and humanity’s place in it but also retains a sense of justified value, meaningfulness, and sustainable happiness. But first, let’s look at the notion of the absurd head-on to better understand how it destroys the illusion of a grand, cosmic sense of meaningfulness. Only then can you begin to take real steps toward personal liberation.