"Life is not worth living" =/= "Life is worth not living"
I've begun reading myth of Sisyphus, which starts with the assertion that "Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy", and upon further reading my skepticism as for Camus' possible answer was alarmed by the phrase "One kills oneself because life is not worth living. That is certainly a truth, yet an unfruitful one, because it is a truism."
I don't agree that one kills oneself because life is not worth living. One kills oneself because life is worth not living. The distinction is important. Please indulge me as I try to find a nice way to share my thoughts.
To start: most people are convinced that there is some authority on which they can ground statements about purpose, meaning, or worth. That's to say, "meaning" has a source somewhere, and it can be evaluated. In other words, it "exists", almost as if there is some layer of reality that embeds or grounds statements of purpose or meaning. This seems like it cannot be denied, in essence because of an experiential view: "Some things just FEEL meaningful to me!".
But the mere fact that I think or feel a thing doesn't have any bearing on the things truth-value! For example, one person may say "I just really FEEL that God is out there", and another may say "I really FEEL that there is no God". This cannot both be fully true. My point is, the FEELING that I call a feeling of God is real and undeniable, but it doesn't tell me anything about the realness of God itself, otherwise, conversely, the existence of an atheist would disprove the existence of God. Feeling a thing =/= having direct contact with that thing.
So when people talk about "something being worth it" they mistake their feeling of meaningfulness as direct access to its real actual "meaning" that "exists". And in that view, when someone says "Life is not worth living" they mean that things generally have worth and meaning, and when evaluating life on that same metric, its 'meaning value' computes to be zero, so any alternative with a higher 'meaning value' would be preferrable.
But in my understanding, the proper reframing would be that if I say "Life is not worth living" I actually mean that there is no foundation or authority on which I can ground any evaluation of value.
So my conclusion: It's not that things are meaningless because they could have had meaning but they don't, they're meaningless because 'meaning' never existed in the first place. Zero =/= NULL.
So if someone would want to argue for suicide, they would not have to prove that "Life is not worth living", but rather that "It is worth it not to live life". And then, wham, all of a sudden you have to prove that there is any authority on which to base an evaluation of meaning!
And by the way, any of you who fall in the camp of believing 1) meaning doesn't exist, and 2) therefore we get to create our own meaning, I refer you back to proposition 1: meaning doesn't exist! We may think we're creating meaning, but it doesn't exist!
I'd love to hear if the book expands on this, though I'll keep reading regardless. I'd also appreciate anybody poking holes in this, as long as you'll appreciate me poking back. Cheers!