The absence of meaning strips colors away from our lives. Everything fades to grey, moving in automated indifference towards an inconceivable destination. Like travelers without a compass, we may find ourselves living without a clear purpose, unsure if there is any meaning to our striving. If you have ever felt this way, you have experienced what philosophers call an existential crisis.
The Myth of Sisyphus: On the Absurdity of Life
The ancient Greek myth of Sisyphus is the most famous allegory of the meaninglessness of life. As the story goes, Sisyphus is condemned by the Gods to spend eternity arduously pushing a boulder up a mountain, only to watch it fall back to the ground as it neared the summit. Trapped in the loop of eternally performing a meaningless task, Sysiphus became a symbol of the human condition, as interpreted by Albert Camus.
Camus believed that the tragedy of man lies in his search for meaning in an inherently meaningless world. Human existence is essentially absurd, torn apart in the conflict between one’s futile search for rational understanding and resolution in the face of an irrational and indifferent universe. As he explains, “the Absurd is not in man nor in the world, but in their presence together” (Camus, 1942).
Is a Meaningless Life Worth Living?
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Sign up to our Free Weekly NewsletterCamus argued that the myth of Sisyphus is the story of all of us. As he remarked, “The workman of today works every day in his life at the same tasks, and this fate is no less absurd, but it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious” (Camus, 1942). The principal question, whose answer he believed was the fundamental task of any serious philosophy, was whether or not life is worth living. He started his famous essay, The Myth of Sisyphus, saying that nobody considered taking their lives when confronted with the findings of ontology, metaphysics, or science, but many contemplated suicide in the face of the inherent meaninglessness of their lives.
The simple answer to this profound and painful question is that life, in all its absurdity, is worth living for its own sake. Camus rebuked the attempts of former existentialist philosophers to escape absurdity. We must not search for some higher purpose, but embrace the utter meaninglessness and absurdity of life. To live authentically, freely, and passionately, without succumbing to despair and nihilism, is what Camus considers to be the ultimate revolt against the absurd. “I rebel, therefore I exist” was his reformulation of the Cartesian cogito in his book, The Rebel.
Can We Find Joy in a Meaningless World?
Life is beautiful in its nonsensical transience. If we can live authentically, harmonizing who we are with how we lead our lives, we can attain the joy whose key is authenticity. Happiness and meaninglessness, according to Camus, are not mutually exclusive principles. On the contrary, just like the adrenaline rush of dangerous experiences makes us feel more alive, life “will be lived all the better if it has no meaning” (Camus, 1942). Once we fully embrace the absurdity of our existence, we can live life to the fullest, in the present moment, unconcerned with the fulfillment of an elusive purpose in the future. As he famously concluded his essay on Sisyphus, “The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy”.
Life Is Not a Journey: On Changing Our Perspective
We are trained to be goal-oriented, chasing an ever-elusive point of ‘arrival’ where it would all make sense, where all our efforts and striving would finally pay off, and where we can attain a long-awaited inner resolution and fulfillment. Yet when we reach what we perceive as our destination, we often find ourselves underwhelmed and disappointed by the fleeting satisfaction of our ‘arrival’, urged to rush to the nearest road map and find the next goal worth seeking. Like Sysiphus, we are caught in a loop of perpetual striving towards an end that we never attain. “We simply cheated ourselves the whole way down the line”, argued Alan Watts.
Despite the vast difference between his philosophy and that of Camus, Watts is among the few thinkers who have expressed the necessity of living life for its own sake in the simplest of terms. The meaning of life, according to him, is simply to be alive. The physical universe does not have a purpose towards which it is heading, nor does our lives. Watts suggested that our existence is best perceived in the same way as we perceive art. A musician doesn’t play music to reach the end of his piece, nor does a dancer dance to reach a certain area of the dancefloor. The point of music is music. The purpose of dancing is the dance itself. Only in viewing life as such does our seeking unite with what is sought, which is the essence of fulfillment. As Watts concluded in The Tao of Philosophy (1960-1973):
“We’ve thought of life by analogy with a journey, which had a serious purpose at the end, and the point was to get to that end. But we missed the point the whole way along. It was a musical thing, and you were supposed to dance while the music was being played”.
