Eric Barker has a wonderful post summarising Camus’ thoughts on finding meaning in life. A good reminder to paint our own canvas and live with passion, even when things are tough and life seems meaningless. I’m not sure I’m strong enough to always be kind and forgiving, even to those I love, but it’s a goal worth aiming for.
Excerpts:
Camus isn’t telling you that life is pointless; he’s telling you that life has no given point. The point is what you do, and how honestly you do it. Camus didn’t say there is no meaning; he said there is no meaning unless you live as if there is. You have to earn it. With action. To live so deliberately, so unapologetically in the face of The Absurd that you become your own answer.
Real freedom is choosing, but with no promise of success, no cosmic guarantee. It’s acting as if it matters when you know it might not. And if that makes you uncomfortable, good. That means you’re paying attention. Freedom isn’t liberation from constraints; it’s what happens when you acknowledge, without excuse, that you are the sole author of your actions. Because freedom isn’t an escape from fear. It’s choosing in spite of it. It’s stepping into the uncertainty without needing to know how it ends…
The world may be absurd, but your actions aren’t. That solidarity isn’t a reward for good people; it’s how you become one…
Camus wrote about The Absurd as a challenge. When life refuses to give you meaning, you don’t give up. Camus tells us: the only way to survive the universe’s indifference is to become stubbornly, gloriously alive anyway. He wanted us to pour ourselves into everything: love, art, work, friendship, the whole messy buffet of human existence…
Most of our lives won’t be remembered long after we’re gone. But maybe, if we’re lucky, someone will remember the way we made them laugh until they cried, or the way we kissed them in the kitchen while the pasta boiled over, or the way we cared, stupidly and stubbornly, about something that didn’t matter to anyone but us.
The moments I remember most, the ones that feel lit from within, aren’t the logical ones. They aren’t efficient or strategic. They’re messy. They’re stupid. But they’re passionate. They’re the arguments that ended in laughter, the friendships that started with confessions, the blog posts that somehow arrived at clarity through sheer stubborn intensity. So yes, let’s live with passion. Let’s love like idiots, work like maniacs, and create like children with crayons and no concern for staying inside the lines.
It’s easier, of course, to detach. To call things meaningless and retreat into irony or intellect or whatever shield we’ve built to keep the world at a distance. But nothing grows in that space. To live with passion is to risk being broken. But it’s also the only way to be whole…
A while back, during a particularly grim stretch of what I call “my life”, I thought the lesson was detachment. I thought Camus was saying nothing matters, so don’t get too close. But I was wrong. He wasn’t asking us to step back. He was daring us to step closer. To love anyway. To create anyway.
There’s no epiphany. Just small, stubborn acts. A soft defiance. You love people who might not love you back. To be kind, even when kindness feels futile. To forgive someone who doesn’t say sorry. To write something no one will ever read, or plant something you might not live to see bloom. Because you’re free. The only meaning is the meaning we make.
Accept the responsibility. Enjoy the companionship of friends. Feel the passion in those moments that forge memories. And, if we embrace these things, it’s more than worth it. Life isn’t meaningless; it’s just a blank canvas upon which we paint.
Let’s see the world as it is: messy, indifferent, occasionally beautiful, filled with both disappointments and joys.
The Absurd doesn’t go away. But if you live with passion, you stop needing it to.
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