BY: ADRIAN SMITH
“There’s no referee for life,” a friend told me as he laughed at the bad luck I was having that week, “there’s no one standing there seeing to it that everything you do, good or bad, balances out and receives its appropriate outcome in the end. Shit just happens.” I kept staring at my email with a defeated smile on my face. I’d been rushing through a project all day to meet its deadline, and now, an hour after it was due and had been submitted, I got an email from my professor saying the class had the weekend to hand it in if it hasn’t already been submitted.
All I could do was laugh, really. Then I thought about this quote I read from Albert Camus not too long before. “This world in itself is not reasonable, that is all that can be said.” Albert Camus was the French philosopher, author and journalist from the 1940s whose views contributed to the rise of absurdism—the belief that human beings exist in a purposeless, chaotic universe.
In A Life Worth Living, Camus bravely tackles some of the biggest questions in philosophy—questions pertaining to who are, where and whether we can find meaning in the world. Instead of placing emphasis on capturing the answers for these large questions, however, Camus places more importance on the idea of simply continuing the chase for potential answers, regardless of whether or not we ever find them. “It places a consciousness of itself at the core of human existence,” historian Robert Zaretsky notes when speaking about Camus and his views, “for Camus, however, this astonishment results from our confrontation with a world that refuses to surrender meaning. It occurs when our need for meaning shatters against the indifference of the world.”
Albert Camus believed the world is indifferent to our desires, sufferings, emotions, efforts and actions. In order to find happiness within the world, we must live in constant exploration of our own meanings and find our own truths for ourselves in life. This search for meaning is our greatest source of agency, according to Camus. We can lament over the chaotic nature of our existence because we lack power over its affairs, but we can’t forget that we as individuals have the freedom to decide all our actions, and their consequent meanings, for ourselves. Everything simply depends on what you make of the sporadic situations and circumstances life hands you. The question of meaning in life is closely connected to the idea of happiness for Camus.
He emphasizes that happiness is fleeting. For Camus, morality is cause for a greater appreciation of life and happiness. Throughout his life, the French author was an active believer in the idea that happiness is nothing less than our moral obligation as human beings. In her article ‘Albert Camus on Our Search for Meaning and Why Happiness Is Our Moral Obligation,’ Maria Popova rightly mentions, “the cultivation of happiness and the eradication of its obstacles was his most persistent lens on meaning.” Albert Camus won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957—the second youngest recipient after Rudyard Kipling. His development of absurdism and the contributions he provided to this school of thought remain relevant today and has influenced the work of many authors, filmmakers, and thinkers over the years.
