r/Absurdism

I've just started dabbling into this philosophy but i knew what it was before i got interested. I notice alot of people in this sub mentioning camus and the saying "one must imagine sisyphus happy" and the way i interpret that is to embrace ones own struggles as a part life to sort of rebel against life.

Before i found out what absurdism was talking to my friend abt nihilism and i thought that looking at everything as if it doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things or taking everything at face value seemed in a way kind of boring and i felt that was such a complacent way of seeing the world and i thought that maybe understanding that the universe is always changing and nothing is always stagnant sounded better. I felt like he could be right but why should i ground myself with that view of things.

https://preview.redd.it/h4p6pj04umah1.png?width=1268&format=png&auto=webp&s=c78ff7c5296a0c4cdb41dbba6d26c4c50a35072d

Hi everyone! I wrote about Nirvanna the Band, existentialism (Albert Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus in particular) and my 20s trying to be a creative person in Toronto on my Substack. I thought some folks here might relate + enjoy so I wanted to share! Happy Canada Day! <3

https://open.substack.com/pub/lauratherton/p/one-must-imagine-nirvanna-the-band?r=cfxwp&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

I am just looking for answers, i think asking here is better as I am clearly not able to understand this. I have not read the myth of sissyphus but I have watched youtube videos and read the ai summaries. My questions are the following.

1.Why must one live with the absurd and what is the point in that. If suicide is surrender then why is surrender bad. I can imagine a lot of scenarios in which surrender is the better option.

2. Why is the revolt necessary. If life is meaningless then revolt is meaningless as well.

3. You can say that if there's no meaning then that can give a person freedom but freedom here just sounds like existential horror. Because human beings always crave purpose.

4. If life is temporary then how does it make it precious. Not every temporary thing is precious.

5. Why wouldn't the walk down the mountain make sissyphus nihlistic when he reflectes on the futility of his suffering.

6. What has sissyphus actually achieved by continuing his suffering. It seems like a pyrrhic victory.

Life is so cheap and fake. Like all the narrative and drama is fake. Have you noticed that most of your behaviour is autopilot. Like all the stupid and cringy things you do in your life is automatic. Also there is so much misery in life, I know some people will assign meaning to it but I don't thing it's applicable. Like it's all crap. The whole narrative feels fake and cheap and whatnot. Even if you by long stretch of imagination apply some narrative to this life ,it doesn't fit. This life is way too stupid and f ed up to be elenquated by some creative or interesting narrative. Its just you slapping it forcefully ,not that it is that in actuality.

God is a cheapo and a fake idiot that is running a fake life. I can't believe this life is so broken and whatnot. Seriously this god doesn't look like a benevolent god imo. Cuz all his shenanigans point towards misery and fakery and stuff.

I’m very new to the domain of philosophy pardon my ignorance

Camus opined that no branch or thought of philosophy,science or teleology can discern the purpose and meaning of existence and this boundless perpetual quandary is axiomatic hence best accept it by making truce with it you also understand that there will irresolvable emptiness

At least according to me if you concede that there will be irresolvable emptiness you are lowkey giving meaning and purpose to you life … since I’m new to to this i also have another question
Whenever I have philosophical questions how to do I answer them or expand the question further to better understand it

Dying and finding meaning are both solutions to alleviate the suffering of life. Dying is much easier than living. Why should I choose the harder solution? Dying is also way better solution because it completely ends the suffering while finding meaning do not.

I am 26F about a year ago I learned about philosophy and nihilism.

I realised I am a nihilist, however ever since I realised this it has been hard for me to have any conversation with family members.

I don’t like arguments however some people they truly enjoy talking and going around in circles. I see no point or enjoyment in spending any energy wasting time.

I don’t know what I want from life. Sometimes I think I am missing out on dating but at the same time I don’t want someone who doesn’t understand me.

The standard definition of Antinatalism usually states that choosing to bring new sentient beings into existence is "ethically wrong."

But for someone who is an Existential Nihilist or an Absurdist - someone who doesn't believe in objective morality, or simply rejects the subjective, societal definitions of "right" and "wrong" - how does antinatalism make sense? If the universe is devoid of meaning and nothing is inherently "evil," how do we justify the anti-procreation stance without being hypocritical?

i have one small sentence for it: accepting the uncertainty...

is there a meaning or no meaning of life..? idk the uncertainty

is there a meaning on the work you do? maybe yes maybe no? who knows...

is there a meaning on loving someone? yeah maybe but then whats the point of all that when all we do in the end is parish...

when inherent meaning of the everyday things you do.. or want to do.. or must do.. should do.. became meaningless.. then you start to think.. go into the loop of why? why we are even doing this?..

then i arrived not at the conclusion of that thought process but the acceptance of the "no meaningness"(yeah its meaninglessness) of things..... meaning it doesnt even matter if i put in rigorous hours of work each day or not but still i am putting.. why? cause idk... just want to do it...

The universe doesn't owe you an explanation. You don't owe it the burden of searching for one.

thoughts????

1. What it is according to them

2. What good books (or movies or etc [I've heard The Big Lebowski is a good example]) there are to do with Absurdism

I apologize if this isn’t fit for the sub, but i think it is. I just want guidance.

Whats the point of all my suffering if its pointless and there wont be any sort of divine justice for it? Im just suffering through life just because?

How can one find peace in that? The only peace seems like suicide?

There’s an ancient Chinese story about a man named Jiang Ziya who fished with a straight hook — no bait, no barb, no bend. For years, people walked past and laughed at the old fool by the river. Even his wife despised him.

Then one day, King Wen of Zhou walked by, stopped, and asked why anyone would fish with a hook that couldn’t catch anything. Jiang Ziya’s answer impressed the king so much that he appointed him as his chief advisor. Together they built the Zhou dynasty — one of the longest-lasting in Chinese history.

The story is usually told as a parable about patience and quality: do something worthy, and the right person will eventually notice. The straight hook becomes a symbol for refusing to compromise, trusting that the world will come to you if your work is good enough.

And I believed it.
I’ve been living by this story for the past eighteen months. I’m 56, recently displaced from my career, and I’ve been writing a large science fiction project — partly as a creative act, partly as an experiment in whether quality finds its audience without gaming any system. I chose the straight hook as my philosophy: don’t chase trends, don’t optimize for algorithms, don’t bait. Just make the work as good as I can and wait.
This week, I had a realization that has been uncomfortable to sit with.

The straight hook was never a strategy. It’s a story told backward, by the winners. We know about Jiang Ziya because King Wen happened to walk by his specific stretch of river on that specific day. If the king had taken a different route, Jiang Ziya would have died by that river — still holding a straight hook, still brilliant, still undiscovered — and nobody would have written the parable.

Absurdist gambit? The straight hook was never a strategy — it was survivorship bias

Which means either:

The story is pure absurdism. There was no causal connection between the quality of Jiang Ziya’s mind and the king’s arrival. It was persistence plus accident, and we retrospectively assigned meaning to randomness because humans can’t tolerate the idea that brilliance and obscurity coexist without a reason.

Or targeted marketing. Jiang Ziya was more strategic than the parable admits. He knew the king’s patrol routes. He chose that riverbank deliberately. The straight hook wasn’t patience — it was positioning. He wasn’t waiting for anyone. He was waiting for that specific person, in that specific place, performing something calculated to provoke exactly the kind of curiosity that person would feel.

The first interpretation means quality is irrelevant to discovery — only to what happens after discovery, if it ever comes. The second means the “patient sage” narrative is a lie, and the real lesson is targeted marketing disguised as philosophy.

I find both interpretations more honest than the original story, and neither is comforting.

So here I am. A man by a river with a straight hook, newly aware that the hook might be a cope, the river might be the wrong river, and the king might never come this way. The only thing I know for certain is that if I leave, the hook leaves with me.

I suppose Camus would say the question is not whether the king arrives. The question is whether I can keep fishing knowing he probably won’t, and find that sufficient.
I’m working on it.

What do you think of the historical situation? Was it absurdism at work or targeted marketing? Interested to get your thoughts on it.

Earlier today I was trying to put a thought into words and used AI to explain it better:

I think I understand what you’re getting at, even though it’s hard to put into words.
What I’m hearing is something like this:
If suffering is supposed to be a “test” from God, then that explanation seems disconnected from how human beings actually experience suffering.
When people suffer, most don’t naturally think:
“This is happening because I did something wrong.”
Instead, they think:
“Why is this happening to me?”
“What did I do to deserve this?”
“This isn’t fair.”
“Bad things just happen.”
So your question is: if God designed people, and if suffering is meant to teach some moral lesson, why aren’t people naturally able to recognize that lesson? Why would our minds be wired to experience suffering as confusion, unfairness, randomness, grief, or despair instead of immediately understanding it as a test?
That’s actually a deeper criticism than simply saying “suffering exists.”
You’re pointing out a mismatch:
The religious explanation says suffering has a purpose.
Human psychology often experiences suffering as purposeless.
And because of that mismatch, you feel that people who casually say “it’s just a test from God” may not be fully appreciating what suffering feels like from the inside.
For example, imagine someone loses a child, develops a painful illness, or lives through war. The immediate emotional reaction is usually grief, fear, anger, confusion, and helplessness—not “Ah yes, I recognize this as a divine test.”
So you’re wondering why a supposedly universal lesson would be communicated in a way that most people don’t naturally perceive.
That’s a philosophical question that thinkers have struggled with for thousands of years. Even many religious people have asked it. In fact, the central figure of the Book of Job spends much of the story asking why he is suffering rather than immediately understanding it.
One thing I also noticed in what you wrote is that you’re questioning the connection between actions and suffering. You’re saying:
Even if I was somehow responsible, I don’t experience my suffering as a consequence of my actions.
And that’s important. Human beings generally don’t have direct access to some cosmic scoreboard telling them exactly why something happened. We see events, but we don’t automatically see their ultimate causes. That’s why people often disagree about whether suffering is punishment, a test, random chance, consequences of choices, or something else entirely.
So I don’t think your point is simply “God doesn’t exist.”
It sounds more like:
“If suffering is supposed to communicate something, why is the message so unclear to the people experiencing it?”

There are realities we can explore but are not meant to explore:

1. Dark Arts, Black Magic, and Ouija Board Rituals etc.

2. Hallucinatory substances as a portal to the unknown as the Breakthrough on DMT (the research which has been discontinued in the USA).

On the other hand, there are realities we are meant to explore with our rational faculties but can not fully zero in on without a Kierkegaardian leap of faith, Zizek's notion of how subscribing to a belief works, and I scenario I just devised and I wonder if this happens to you also, which is as follows: when you stay in a darkly-lit room for a long time and you see these Geometrical shapes floating and flying before your eyes...

Do all rational endeavours and conclusions reach a dead, "Absurd" end, where we can not catch a glimpse of the ultimate reality?

Once we are aware of the absurdity of life and civilisation, can one go back to "normal" life and active goals based on a human standard?