You know when you’re brushing your teeth before you go to bed and take a minute to look at yourself in the bathroom mirror and during this time you somewhat disassociate? It’s not exactly a life changing experience but just a quick glance where you think to yourself, “Oh, that’s really me living this life and going to school here in this human body”. It feels like there’s a gap between myself and the world we all live in. This gap I have described is what Camus classifies as the absurd. First, there is a beginning to this realization of the absurd. It’s like the first time any of us have stared at ourselves in the bathroom mirror and questioned our existence. We know we exist through our basic senses, but there will always be a difference between content that we create in our lives that build on these senses. For example, the content could be playing tennis on campus which proves you are able to use your senses, thus constituting existence. Camus further argues that once we become aware of this absurdity, there’s a crucial decision made whether to live knowing this gap exists or to commit suicide. If we choose to live we then must live passionately recognizing this absurdity exists. However, this argument is too simple since there must be ways people live passionately to create meaning in their lives that have not been mentioned yet. There has to be a way for us to cope with the awareness that the world can never provide the meaning that we desire.
There are different versions of the absurdity. The one I found the most interesting was regarding the moment where Camus discusses the awareness of death and its relation to time. Camus addresses that we tend to always look forward to tomorrow yet one day we come to a realization that time leads us to death. There is a certain horror that comes with this realization
since death is a scary yet illusionary experience. None of us will know death until we experience it. Whenever a Tiktok on my feed is about someone who claims to have been legally dead for two minutes I listen to what they’re saying as if there’s no tomorrow (literally). The fear of death is something that I often forget about until the idea of dying randomly crosses my mind again. We always look forward to tomorrow yet one day a “tomorrow” is our last day of living. Therefore, according to Camus, there should be a fear of tomorrow. This contradiction of existence is known as another version of the absurdity. Time cannot sustain or provide the meaning we look for in our futures yet we heavily value time. Time structures the meanings we long for but is also a countdown to death. These different examples of absurdity that Camus provides all come down to this idea of divorce between intention and reality.
