“I’m filled with a desire for clarity and meaning within a world and condition that offers neither.”
~ Albert Camus
Is life an absurd, meaningless mess, as Albert Camus once suggested?
There may be an underlying pattern to the “so-called” mess, but beyond our innate ability or willingness to fully understand it. Thus, we devise comfortable ideas to alleviate our fears of not knowing or knowing too much; using religion, scientific theories, political platforms, conspiracy theories, psychotherapy, Internet memes, or whatever else personally mitigates one’s discomfort with confusion, uncertainty, and reality.
The “possible” absurdity being that ten different people observing the same mess, may spend ten years devising ten different theories about the mess, despite their unacknowledged avoidance of knowing or accepting the naked truth. Maybe even more absurd, is when they agree to disagree, as if there is an agreed upon competition in progress, and that playing by the rules—political, social, economic, religious, and scientific—is more important than following the experiential path of truth, in whatever manner it presents itself.
The competition for being RIGHT, is often the goal for many so-called truth seekers; the actual truth taking a back seat to winning the prize for being declared as RIGHT and being in the know. Inflated egos at play within a comfort hungry world, transforming the inherently meaningful into the appearance of messiness and meaninglessness, only to re-simplify and substitute it with advantageous and profitable meanings, and providing the comfortable illusion of KNOWING and being RIGHT. This may be the ultimate absurdity: selling ourselves and the world on comfortable illusions.
© 2022 David M. Rubin. All rights reserved.
Notes from David 