How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question

by Michael Schur

So what’s option number three? 3. We can acknowledge the fundamental absurdity of the human condition, and just kind of exist within it! I added the exclamation point to try to hide how bleak a sentence that is. But for Camus, that’s the only real answer. I don’t know whether this world has a meaning that transcends it. But I know that I do not know that meaning and that it is impossible for me just now to know it.… These two certainties—my appetite for the absolute and for unity and the impossibility of reducing this world to a rational and reasonable principle—I also know that I cannot reconcile them. The only way to cope with our desire for meaning inside an empty, pointless universe is to recognize how absurd it is that we exist in an empty, pointless universe and still desire meaning. He wants us to stand in the middle of the hurricane of absurdity, neither denying it nor allowing it to defeat us.