Camus broke down his version of existentialism (which, again, he denied it was, blah blah blah) this way: Humans desire meaning from the universe, but the universe is cold and indifferent and denies us that meaning; in fact, nothing “means” anything, really, or at least nothing is more “meaningful” than anything else. So we’re just little specks of nothingness on a big dumb rock floating in space, desperately searching for something we’ll never find, and thus, the human condition is fundamentally absurd.
