Absurdism: Life is Meaningless

Sisyphus was a great king of Greek mythology. So clever, he was able to outwit the gods themselves. Twice he cheated death; first by capturing Thanatos, the god of death, then by tricking the goddess of the underworld, Persephone, into releasing him back into the lands of the living. The gods weren't happy with this, and so for his arrogance, Sisyphus was given a deceptively simple punishment: roll a boulder up a hill. The problem was that the boulder had been magically enchanted to fall back down to the bottom every time Sisyphus managed to get it to the top, effectively condemning him to an eternity of repeating the same impossible and meaningless task.

Able interpretations of the myth view it as an allegory for the futility of trying to escape death, no matter how powerful or clever a person is; we're all doomed to meet the same fate. More modern audiences have found something more relatable about Sisyphus's struggle, seeing it not as a simple parable about the inevitability of death, but more like a metaphor for the drudgery and monotony of their own lives. Every day we wake up, make coffee, take the train to work, stare at a computer for hours, get yelled at by our boss, stare at the computer some more, then take the train back home, binge Netflix or YouTube while eating dinner, go to bed, and then wake up and do it all over again.

Just like Sisyphus, we seem condemned to repeat the same meaningless tasks over and over and over. Most of us do this every day for the rest of our lives, as though we're sleepwalking, never waking up or stopping to ask why. For some of us, one day we're standing on a street corner preparing to go to work when in an instant we're struck by the strangeness of it all. Suddenly nothing appears to have purpose; life is haphazard and meaningless. You look around and you whisper to yourself, "Why are all of these people even in such a hurry? For that matter, why am I? What's the point of all this? Why am I even alive?"

There's a modern-day problem with absurdism: money, or the lack thereof. The reason many of us never pause to ponder our meaning is because we don't have the economic stability to do so. It's difficult to think about the meaning of life when you're worrying about keeping a roof over your head, which is why we're getting to a point where financial stability may just be the first step towards embracing the absurd. However, in 2022, that's easier said than done.

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Back to our story: human beings crave meaning. It's part of our biology; we're evolutionarily programmed to search for patterns in chaos to try and understand why things are happening. It's how we learn. The problem is that existence is, at best, random and irrational. Nothing really seems to matter. Your loved ones die, stars explode, natural disasters wipe out entire cities, and millions of people spend half their day on TikTok, and for what? Yet we keep going, constantly striving to create order by giving these things purpose, despite the universe denying it.

This conflict is what the French-Algerian philosopher Albert Camus referred to as the Absurd. It's an irreconcilable paradox. We yearn for meaning in a meaningless world.