Transcript of Life Has No Meaning. Here's Why That's Actually Good News | Albert Camus

[Music] You wake up. You go to work. You come home. You sleep. Repeat. Someone asks you, "What's the point of all this?" And for a split second, you don't have an answer. That feeling, that brief moment of vertigo when the floor drops out from under your life's routine. Albert Kimu had a name for it, the absurd. And he believed that recognizing it, really seeing it, might be the most liberating thing you ever do. The absurd isn't complicated. It's the collision between two things. One, your deep human need for meaning, purpose, clarity. You want life to make sense. You want your suffering to mean something. You want a reason. Two, a universe that doesn't give you one. No cosmic instruction manual. No divine plan, just silence. Kimu called this the confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world. You're like a lawyer demanding answers from a witness who can't speak. The absurd is realizing the witness will never speak. Most people spend their entire lives running from this realization. They construct elaborate stories. I'm here to serve God. I'm building a legacy. I'm finding my purpose. Not because these stories are true, but because the alternative is terrifying. But Kimu says, "What if we stopped running?" Once you've seen the absurd, really seen it, Kimu says there are only three ways to respond. The first option is physical suicide. If life has no meaning, why continue? just exit. Kimu considers this seriously, not to encourage it, but to understand it. If the absurd is unbearable, isn't this the most logical escape? But here's the twist. Kimu says suicide is a confession of defeat. It's saying the absurd wins. I can't handle it. It's forfeiting the game because you don't like the rules. And Kimu, he wants to keep playing. He sees suicide as the ultimate surrender, a refusal to engage with the fundamental question of existence. It's choosing oblivion over confrontation. But there's something intellectually lazy about it. Kamu argues. You're presented with a philosophical problem, a cosmic puzzle that challenges everything you thought you knew about meaning and purpose. And your response is to simply remove yourself from the equation. It's like walking out of a difficult exam rather than attempting to answer the questions. Kimu believes that while the temptation might be understandable, it's ultimately a cowpout. The absurd has posed a challenge to you and suicide is refusing that challenge. It's saying the absence of inherent meaning is so intolerable that you'd rather not exist at all than exist without cosmic justification. But Kimu sees this as missing something crucial. The very act of recognizing the absurd of being conscious enough to identify this fundamental tension between human desire and cosmic indifference is itself remarkable. Consciousness is both the source of the problem and potentially the source of something else entirely. To choose suicide is to privilege the absence of meaning over the presence of experience. To decide that because life doesn't come with built-in purpose, it's not worth the trouble of creating your own encounters with beauty, connection, pleasure, or even interesting suffering. Kimu finds this reasoning backwards. Yes, the universe is silent. Yes, your existence lacks predetermined significance. But you're here anyway, capable of asking these questions, capable of feeling the weight of meaninglessness, which means you're also capable of feeling everything else. The person who chooses suicide is making a calculation that no inherent meaning equals no possible value. And Kamith fundamentally disagrees with that math. He sees it as a failure of imagination, a failure to recognize that the absurdity of existence doesn't negate the reality of experience. You still taste your coffee. You still feel sunlight. You still laugh at jokes. You still love people, even if that love has no cosmic significance. Suicide treats the absence of ultimate meaning as if it erases the presence of immediate experience. And that's where Kimu parts ways with it. The second option is subtler and in some ways more tempting. You don't end your life. You end the question. You make a leap of faith. You decide God gives meaning or the universe has a plan or everything happens for a reason. Problem solved. Right? Kimu calls this philosophical suicide. You're killing the confrontation with the absurd by pretending it doesn't exist. You're saying, "I can't live without meaning, so I'll just invent some." And look, Kimu gets it. This works for a lot of people. Religion, spirituality, cosmic optimism. These aren't stupid. They're deeply tempting. They offer comfort, community, structure, purpose. They provide answers to questions that might otherwise keep you awake at night. They tell you that your suffering serves a higher purpose, that your existence fits into a grand design, that someone or something is watching, caring, keeping score. But Kimu says it's intellectually dishonest. You're putting on a mask to avoid seeing your own reflection. You've looked into the abyss of meaninglessness, felt the full weight of cosmic indifference, and then decided you're just going to pretend you didn't see what you saw. It's like walking into a room, seeing something disturbing, walking back out, and then convincing yourself the room is empty. The philosophical leap of faith requires you to abandon the very rational faculties that led you to recognize the absurd in the first place. You use reason to arrive at the conclusion that existence lacks inherent meaning, and then you use faith to override that conclusion. You're basically saying, "My logic led me here, but I don't like it here, so I'm going to trust something beyond logic instead." For Kimu, this is a betrayal of intellectual integrity. It's choosing comfort over truth. And he's not saying this to be cruel or dismissive of religious people. He understands the appeal completely. The leap of faith offers relief from existential anxiety. It provides clear moral frameworks, promises of cosmic justice, and the comforting notion that someone's in charge, that there's a plan, that it all means something. But Kimu argues that once you genuinely confronted the absurd once you've really understood the silence of the universe, you can't unknow it. You can pretend to unknow it. You can surround yourself with rituals and texts and communities that reinforce a different narrative, but somewhere deep down, you know what you saw. You know, the universe didn't answer. And choosing to believe otherwise isn't faith in the pure sense. It's a strategic decision to stop asking questions that have no comfortable answers. The leap of faith in Kimu's view is essentially saying, "I would rather believe a beautiful lie than live with an uncomfortable truth." And while that's psychologically understandable, it's philosophically cowardly. It's deciding that your need for meaning is more important than your commitment to honestly assessing reality as it presents itself. Now, Kimu would acknowledge that maybe he's wrong. Maybe there is a God. Maybe the universe does have inherent meaning. But the point is, you don't know that. You can't know that. And the leap of faith requires you to act as if you do know that. To commit to a truth claim without sufficient evidence purely because the alternative is psychologically difficult. For Kimu, this is where the existential hero diverges from the religious believer. Both face the same absurd, the same cosmic silence, but they respond differently. The believer says, "This silence is intolerable, so I'll fill it with God's voice." The existential hero says, "This silence is the truth, and I'll live within it honestly." The third option, Kimu's option, is revolt. not revolt against society or politics, but revolt against the absurd itself. You acknowledge it. You stare it in the face and you say, "I see you. Life has no meaning, and I'm going to live anyway, fully, passionately, defiantly." This is the absurd man. The person who refuses both suicide and selfdeception. He lives without hope, not in despair, but in freedom. He doesn't need the universe to validate him. He doesn't need a cosmic participation trophy. He creates his own meaning knowing it's temporary, knowing it's absurd. And that's precisely what makes it beautiful. The revolt Kimu describes isn't passive acceptance. It's active defiance. It's looking at a meaningless universe in deciding to create, to love, to build, to experience anyway. It's acknowledging that your life doesn't matter in any ultimate sense and then choosing to make it matter to you right now in this moment for no reason other than because you can. The absurd man doesn't win against the absurd. The absurd is permanent. It's the fundamental condition of human existence. You will never escape the tension between your desire for meaning and the universe's refusal to provide it. But the absurd man refuses to let this tension defeat him. He refuses to surrender his consciousness, his experience, his aliveness just because these things lack cosmic endorsement. He finds a strange freedom in the absence of inherent purpose. If nothing matters ultimately, then everything can matter immediately. If there's no script you're supposed to follow, then you're free to write your own, knowing full well it's a story you're telling yourself. But it's your story. You chose it. And that choice, the act of creation in the face of meaninglessness is what Kimoose celebrates. The absurd man doesn't need his suffering to be meaningful. Sometimes pain is just pain. Sometimes loss is just loss. There's no hidden lesson, no character building, no divine purpose being served. Bad things happen because we live in a universe indifferent to our well-being. But the absurd man embraces this too. He doesn't need his pain validated by cosmic narrative. He experiences it, survives it, and keeps going. Not because there's a reward waiting, not because it makes him a better person, but simply because he's choosing to remain alive and engage with existence. This is where Kimu parts ways with both traditional religion and modern self-help culture. Both offer you narratives where suffering serves a purpose. Religion tells you it's a test or a punishment or a path to spiritual growth. Self-help tells you it's building resilience, teaching you lessons, making you stronger. But Camu says no. Sometimes suffering is meaningless. Sometimes terrible things happen for no reason. And you don't need to wrap it in a comforting story. You can acknowledge it as meaningless and still respond to it with courage, compassion, and persistence. The absurd man's revolt is fundamentally about honesty and freedom. honesty about what the universe is and isn't, what it offers and doesn't offer, and freedom that comes from no longer waiting for external validation, no longer seeking permission to live from a silent cosmos. So, what does this look like in practice? It means you stop waiting for life to reveal its purpose. You stop torturing yourself with questions like, "Am I living my true purpose? Is this what I'm meant to do? Does my life matter in the grand scheme?" The absurd man says those questions have no answers. So stop asking them. Instead, you focus on this. The texture of your coffee, the conversation with your friend, the project you're working on, not because it'll change the world, but because you chose it. You don't need suffering to be meaningful. Sometimes pain is just pain. Sometimes loss is just loss. But you embrace it anyway. You keep climbing, not because there's a prize at the summit, but because you're alive, and climbing is what you're doing right now. You create meaning the way an artist creates a painting, knowing full well the painting has no inherent value beyond what you and others decide to give it. You love people knowing that love doesn't echo through eternity. You build things knowing they'll crumble. You pursue goals knowing they're ultimately pointless. And you do all of this not despite the meaninglessness, but in full acknowledgement of it. This is the revolt. This is the defiance. Kimu ends his most famous essay with Seisphus, the Greek king condemned to push a boulder up a mountain forever only to watch it roll back down. The ultimate symbol of meaningless repetition. But Kimu says one must imagine Seisphus happy. Why? Because Sephus is fully conscious. He knows the boulder will fall. He knows the task is pointless and he pushes it anyway. He is free because he stopped expecting the universe to reward him. He stopped waiting for meaning to descend from above. The boulder is his. The struggle is his. The life is his. You are Seisphus. Your job is the boulder. Your relationships are the boulder. Your ambitions, your failures, your daily routine, all of it, the boulder. And the absurd man, he doesn't resent it. He owns it. Think about what this means. Seephophus could spend eternity bitter, angry at the gods who cursed him, raging against the futility of his task. He could push the boulder with resentment, viewing each step as confirmation of life's cruelty. But Kamu suggests something radical. What if Sisphus has come to terms with his fate? What if he's found a kind of peace, even joy in the struggle itself? The moment the boulder rolls back down, there's a moment of pause. Seisphus descends the mountain. And in that descent, in that moment of consciousness, he is fully aware. He knows what awaits him at the bottom. Another push, another climb, another inevitable rolling back. And yet, he continues, not because he's found some hidden meaning in the task. Not because he's convinced himself the gods will eventually relent, but because he's alive and this is his life. The boulder is actually perfect as a metaphor for human existence. It's not dramatically terrible. It's not torture in the conventional sense. It's repetitive, futile, and endless. Sound familiar? Your morning routine, your commute, your work tasks that never really finish but just create more tasks, your efforts to stay healthy that require constant maintenance, your relationships that need continuous attention, your home that keeps getting dirty no matter how often you clean it. Everything rolls back down. Everything requires you to start again. And this is where most people live in quiet desperation, pushing their boulder and waiting for the day when they won't have to push anymore. Waiting for retirement or success or enlightenment or heaven, some end point where the struggle finally pays off and they can rest. But Kimu says the end point never comes or when it does, it's death. So you have a choice. You can push your boulder while waiting for release, living in constant anticipation of a future that justifies the present. Or you could be like Camu's Seisphus. You can push the boulder while being fully present to the act of pushing. You can find the meaning in the struggle itself, not in some imagined destination. This doesn't mean you stop having goals or working toward things. The absurd man isn't passive. He's intensely engaged with life. He pursues projects, builds relationships, creates art, fights for causes. But he does all of this without illusions. He knows his projects will be forgotten. His relationships will end. His art will decay. His causes might fail. And he pursues them anyway. Not because they'll echo through eternity, but because they're his choice, his creation, his rebellion against the silence. Here's the secret K Chem offers you. You don't need permission to live. You don't need a cosmic stamp of approval. You don't need to find your purpose before you're allowed to enjoy your lunch. The meaning of life, there isn't one. And once you accept that, really accept it, you're free. Free to create, free to love, free to fail, free to try again. Not because it matters in some ultimate sense, but because you're here and you get to choose. The absurd man doesn't win against the absurd. He just refuses to lose. And maybe that's enough. Maybe freedom isn't finding the meaning of life. Maybe freedom is recognizing there isn't one and living fully anyway. Maybe happiness isn't a destination you reach after answering life's big questions. Maybe happiness is what happens when you stop asking questions that have no answers and start engaging with the reality in front of you. This is Kimu's gift to you. Not an answer because there isn't one, but a way of living with the question. A way of staring into meaninglessness without flinching, without retreating into comforting lies, without giving up entirely. The way of the absurd man, conscious, defiant, free, and maybe, just maybe, happy. You push your boulder, it rolls back down, you walk down the mountain, catch your breath, and push it again. Not because you have to, not because there's a reward, not because it means something, but because you can, because you're alive, because this is your boulder, your mountain, your life. And in a universe that offers you nothing, that might be everything. One must imagine Seisphus happy. One must imagine you happy. Not because you found the meaning of life, but because you stopped looking for it and started living anyway. [Music]