How To Live A Meaningful Life According To Albert Camus
What will you do when faced with the absurd?
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There are many things we will never be sure of — whether God exists, what awaits us after death, and the meaning of life.
While it might sound obvious, the quality of our life largely depends upon what we spend our time on.
Those who concern themselves with unanswerable questions risk wasting their human experience.
The Myth of Sysiphus by French philosopher Albert Camus wrestles with life’s absurdity.
In the novel, the Nobel Prize-winning author poses a question that has stumped many philosophers before — If all this is going to come to an end, what’s the point of living?
“Man stands face to face with the irrational. He feels within him his longing for happiness and for reason.
The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.”
Everyone encounters the absurd at some point in their lives.
The drag of thoughtless labor, and the tiring tedium of daily transportation, evoke a feeling of hopelessness.
Adult life can seem almost like torture for people who aren’t lucky enough to have familial wealth or thought-provoking jobs.
Let’s face it — No matter how fervently we search for answers, we will never quite understand the meaning of life.
But that doesn’t mean we should give up.
‘Suicide’ doesn’t necessarily involve killing oneself, but always results in the loss of life
Camus’s most famous line is, “There is only one really serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.”
It took me a while to understand this enigmatic statement. The best answer I could find came from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
Camus sees this question of suicide as a natural response to an underlying premise, namely that life is absurd in a…