So today I heard of Camus’s theory of absurdism and I loved it. It fits well with Gilbert’s view of Tricksters and trickster energy. I had no idea someone had laid out my philosophy before.
The meaning of life, the eventual necessity of death, creates a conflict within us all. Not only is our own existence temporary, so is the very life of the world we stand on. We are but fireflies in the eternal night of a universe approaching eventual heat death.
Most people I’ve known laughed at the void, drinking and partying at least while young. Not everyone has such a lighthearted view, but the truth of their feeling lands the next morning in the cold, hungover light of day.
The rest of people have a very strict and serious view of the meaning of life. Religion, or its equivalent in cultural, moral authority gives purpose and guidance to every moment. I have met few people who think otherwise.
When I was a little girl I learned about global warming. Very young, very formative years. I heard animals were going extinct, things were changing very quickly, and greenhouse gasses were accumulating due to fossil fuel burning.
I remember crying to my mother, asking how I was supposed to deal with the world dying. Different people have different ways of dealing with the unexplainable, the unchangeable, the uncontrollable things in life. I felt very young that I had to figure out some way to go to sleep.
Some people told me that I should take the responsibility for changing the world on my own young shoulders. I should grow up to be a climate scientist.
Some people told me I should trust god. God’s plan may well include global warming, climate change raining down god’s justice on sinners, with his chosen few floating away to take refuge like Noah.
Some people told me I was too young to worry about such things. I should eat candy and watch cartoons until I go to sleep. Christmas presents and learning my letters were the only things my size.
I thought they were all wrong. I decided that I would learn whatever I could about what was happening so that I wouldn’t be surprised. I decided that I would enjoy every spring, learn about every bird and butterfly. I would see as much as I could and save the world safe and eternal within my heart.
According to Camus the best way to deal with the void is to stare with passionate and whole-hearted interest. Since then I have read books on glaciers, water, ecology, evolution. I find most authors to have a fatalistic and annoying call to action.
I fully believe that if I require myself to save the world, I will go mad. I cannot close the void. The void was there at the beginning and shall be the end of us all one day. I have known many people who have driven themselves crazy trying to rally themselves and others.
Just as I do not blame myself or require myself to save the world, I do not try to save or control any person on earth. I love the impassioned speakers and changemakers in society, driving it toward the future. But I frustrate them with my lack of movement.
Apparently I subscribe to an absurdist view of the world. I read Man’s Search for Meaning, and he says that people can find meaning in anything. I say meaning is a tautology, and self-referential. Meaning only exists because we search for it, and only exists when we ascribe it. No where on earth is a single scrap of meaning that can be found objective of belief.
So I find meaning in everything. I love creating, art, writing, appreciating the changing seasons and growth and death of plants and animals in the world around me. I read and solve problems and experience every moment with my loved ones grateful for the life I’ve built for myself.
The thing is, I was never able to treat myself so lightly. I was always expecting myself to perform, always beating myself up, trying to get myself to do things. My relationship with the world and others was absurd but my relationship with myself was martyr-like.
I required nothing less than perfect discipline from myself. But I never expected that from others and certainly not from my society or the world around me. I never asked for a god to answer my prayers, I never asked for my loved ones to be perfect. Yet when I listened to my internal life, I had complete failure to control my own actions and suffered greatly by my own hand.
It took a while to get a more absurd view of myself. I started small, practicing what I call “radical self-acceptance.” I read books about intelligence, and cognition, and brain damage, and happiness. Philosophy. I stared bravely into the void. This time the void was where my thoughts come from.
My mental health condition makes me experience the full range of emotions fully and exuberantly whether I would like to or not. This makes my day to day life erratic, this makes my energies rather unusual, my projects unlikely to be finished.
I have been told this makes my energy meaningless. My pursuits are unlikely to add up to something important if they never stack into something tall and unified and whole. But I have decided to indulge myself and enjoy my pursuits anyway.
I have stopped feeling so bad about myself, telling myself there is no bar I have to meet to matter, that there is no innate meaning to some activities and not to others. Every day I wake and put my phone down and think “what do I want to do?” instead of “what should I do?”
I’ve stopped doom-scrolling so much, I’ve stopped numbing myself, I’ve stopped running from the void. I think this is what people mean by harnessing their demons. I have stopped running, I have turned and started examining what scares me. I have gained self respect and bravery.
My relationship with myself has gotten so much better, my life has improved immeasurably. I can look at things from all sides, see the good and the bad and the absurd in situations other people find disheartening.
One day the worst will happen, and my conscience will be clean because I listened to myself every day and didn’t regret a moment. Because everyone always has a choice.
The illustration of the Absurdist philosophy is Sisyphus with his rock. He has been cursed to toil every day, creating nothing that will last. But the idea of a lasting creation is an illusion for we will all fall to dust in the end. So every day I will push my rock, create my painting, write my article, solve my error, and take a happy breath of satisfaction as I look over the valley from the peak of the mountain.
Then the next day, the next error, the next painting, the next article, I start from the very bottom again. I make my way slowly or quickly, a new way or wearing down the one before. I make sure I savor every breath for the idea of eternity is the grand illusion. The days are numbered, down to the breaths, and every one is precious. Every moment is mine.
It never occurred to me that such a pure feeling of satisfaction is absurd. It’s lovely to have it named, ideas rest easier on the mind once they have been named, underlined and the edges found.