The Art of Living a Meaningless Existence: Ideas from Philosophy That Change the Way You Think

by Robert Pantano

we seldom have enough information to properly make any choice,

If we look, we will always find a reason to regret any decision we make.

no path that we take will ever ultimately resolve the uncertainty of life.

To face up to the abyss, to feel the anguish of choice and potentiality, to bear the weight of self—all are but visceral, humbling, and beautiful reminders of the potency of life running through our veins.

so long as we are not intentionally harming anyone else, it is of essential importance that we try as often as possible to ensure that among those people, our self is not one of them.

At any street corner, the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face. Albert Camus

Albert Camus was a twentieth-century French-Algerian writer and philosopher most commonly associated with the existentialism movement.

Camus was a proponent of the idea that our relationship with the universe is completely and fundamentally absurd.

the absurd, or man’s inescapably paradoxical relationship with the universe,

the magnitude of the absurdity will be in direct ratio to the distance between the two terms of my comparison . . . The absurd is essentially a divorce. It lies in neither of the elements compared; it is born of their confrontation.

neither the human nor the universe are necessarily absurd on their own, but rather, their relationship is absurd.

what we want and expect from the universe is fundamentally in contradiction with what we get. In this conflict, the absurdity of the human experience is found.

For Camus, to become aware of and accept the absurdity of life is to transcend it.

In his essay, The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus references the Greek story of Sisyphus as a powerful allegory and teaching to overcome life’s absurdity. In the story, as a punishment for trying to outsmart the gods, the Greek king Sisyphus is condemned to roll a giant rock up a hill. As part of the punishment, however, every time Sisyphus gets to the top of the hill, the rock rolls back down to the bottom, forcing him to start again, over and over, for all of eternity.

In this, Camus draws a connection between the tiresome and futile fate of Sisyphus and the human experience.

Camus wrote, “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” With this, Camus makes the hopeful yet reasonable assertion that even in the ordinary, repetitive, absurd, and futile experiences of our life, we can and should still find worthy experience and happiness.

All of the things that exist around the rock that tend to seem as though they are less important than getting the rock to the top of the hill—the sun, the trees, the refreshing breeze, the friends, the relationships, the family, the art, the self-exploration, and anything else we can find interesting and wondrous—are, for Camus, all there is, and all there needs to be.

it is the absurdity of these things that allows them to have the potential for intrigue and wonder. And it is up to us to be conscious of this and derive meaning from them all.

In the acceptance of our absurd human experience, we realize that the point is not to eliminate absurdity or find and defend some ultimate truth, but rather, it is to be conscious and appreciative of the things within the absurdity—to look for, find, and create things that are interesting and personally meaningful.

Camus suggested that in recognizing our absurdity, we can better accept and share value with the people around us because we can understand that we are all struggling victims of the absurd.

For Camus, continuing on in life and using its absurdity as a means of virtue, exploration, art, and unique experience is perhaps the...

Camus wrote, “The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart.”

What use is finding or creating meaning in life if you cannot maintain and share it well with others?

people are tired strafed by life mutilated either by love or no love. . . . people are not good to each other one on one. people are just not good to each other. we are afraid. we think that hatred signifies strength. that punishment is love. Charles Bukowski

compassion being referred to here suggests a sympathetic understanding of others’ lack of agreeableness—an awareness serving to help calibrate our easily incited impatience, anger, finger-pointing, or disdain toward others over mostly nothing, or things that we don’t really know or understand.

it is perhaps worth approaching every instance, as often as we can, with the awareness that the ignorance and annoyance and sometimes cruelty that we find in others is sometimes found by others in us, sometimes at the same time and with equally valid reasons.

Everyone is absurd in their attempt to trump their own absurd relationship with everything—and

In the words of Schopenhauer, “Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills.”

It is a profound, noble act of humanity to use our awareness of our unawareness as a source of compassion and understanding for others and ourselves, as opposed to a source of disdain and bitterness—to use our unique conscious position to know how hard it is to be in a conscious position, and to acknowledge that everyone else is, in fact, also in one.

“We see the world not as it is, but as we are,” wrote twentieth-century author Anaïs Nin.

the world as it actually is exists in some major part behind a veil of our subjectivity.

having the same mental experience, or qualia,

This and all other problems related to the disconnect between our perception and what is really outside of our mind is known as the egocentric predicament.

This problem is made even more difficult when trying to understand what is experienced in other people’s minds, which is the c...

even though there can be derivative truths concluded from sufficiently shared subjective experiences, about which one can be right (i.e., that the pillow is blue), in the very same sentiment at the very same time, the same someone can be fundamentally wrong.

And so, if all human truths are based on agreements of shared subjective, internal experiences, which are all limited inexorably by human perception, then we can likely never know if there even is a core of objective truth to be reached, or, if there is, if we can conclusively ever reach it.

In the words of St. Augustine, “I err, therefore I am.”

Perhaps we must learn how to fundamentally be ok with being wrong, or we will loathe ourselves until the end. Perhaps we must love and accept the hypocrisy that runs through the very veins of the human condition, or we will hate all of humankind. Perhaps we must learn how to dial back our expectations and the degree to which we dread the inevitable failure of everything we believe, and the beliefs of others just the same.

we are stuck between the awareness of a god and the temperament of an animal.

appraisal theory, initially developed by psychologist Magda Arnold, suggests that our emotional responses are in large part created by our conscious evaluations of events—how we view, interpret, and label stimuli rather than the stimuli themselves.

how we think based on our experiences, perceptions, views, and values determines what we feel.

In the words of American author David Foster Wallace: Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot or will not exercise this kind of choice . . . you will be totally hosed.

“It doesn’t hurt me unless I interpret it’s happening as harmful to me. I can choose not to,” wrote Marcus Aurelius.

In the words of Marcus Aurelius, “Understand at last that you have something in you more powerful and divine than what causes the bodily passions and pulls you like a mere puppet.”

In his famous twentieth-century play, No Exit, Jean-Paul Sartre wrote, “You remember all we were told about the torture-chambers, the fire and brimstone, the “burning marl.” Old wives’ tales! There’s no need for red-hot pokers. Hell is other people!”

hell is the imposed state of dependance and modification of one’s self according to the integration, approval, and satisfaction of other people’s perception.

For Sartre, we naturally identify our sense of self through what he referred to as the look, which essentially refers to the experience of knowingly being in other people’s gaze or perception.

Sartre argued that a full comprehension of our self forms as a result of our perceiving that we are being perceived by others.

He would refer to this construction of self as the other.

Sartre suggested, however, that in the process of trying to fashion ourselves according to how we fit into the look, or minds of other people, we deviate from our free, personal, and subjective self.