(4)

You, dear reader, do not matter. Nothing you have ever done or will do truly means anything, really. It doesn’t matter if you get that promotion at work, it doesn’t matter if you go on a date with that girl you can’t stop thinking about, and it doesn’t matter whether or not your kids are settling into their new school. You mean nothing, and your life will almost certainly count for nought. Nothing you can do will last forever or even last for very long.

The walls of Nineveh were the greatest the world had ever seen. The might of Assyria was blinding, but it’s dust and rubble now. The symphonies of Mozart did not quench the silence that fell as they came to a close. Even if they did, half the children today have never heard of this Mozart, who do you think will remember him five hundred years from now? Maybe some historians, that is all. The glory of Rome still stands for us to see, but will it in one thousand years? Ten thousand? I doubt it. If the actions of empires and great men from history mean little, if anything, in light of the cosmic scale of the universe, what do you really mean? Why should you matter? Chances are, years after your death, people won’t even remember your name.

You wake up; you go to work; you earn money; you come home; you spend money; you go to sleep; repeat. Repeat. This is your life. This is how you live, and this is how you will die. None of this matters in the grand scheme of the universe, for it doesn’t even matter in light of life on Earth.

But you cannot escape the feeling that something does matter, right? Or at the very least something should. It’s easy enough to ignore the unreasonable silence of the universe when all is well, but what about when disaster strikes? Do we not all ask ourselves what it means? When you don’t get that promotion you felt you needed, when your mother falls sick, or when your wife leaves you, you search desperately for a meaning to the madness; for a reason why bad things happen to good people.

You thirst for truth and meaning like a drowning man thirsts for air. This truth seems integral to it all; it gives everything you do meaning. This thing is the reason you do what you do, without it all becomes pointless. You look for it in your family, your church, your friends; a career or political affiliation. Anything from anywhere for a reason to live. Sometimes you feel as though you’ve found it, but it’s a creation of the mind; a mirage we erect to fool ourselves and each other into a semblance of happiness, and it’s based on nothing that cannot be deconstructed into nonexistence, so you search on.

You find nothing, however, and never will. You call out to the night sky in search of answers, but the only reply you get is the wind amongst the trees. No truth is to be found among the stars, nor within yourself. All is silent, and all that answers you is the echo of your desperate screams for meaning.

This is the Absurd, and the state of existence Albert Camus lays out in his 1940 essay “The Myth Of Sisyphus”. A distinction needs to be made here, however. Camus is asserting neither that the universe itself, nor our constant thirst for meaning are absurd in and of themselves, but rather the relationship between the two. Neither reality is absurd, for who are we to make such a judgement? The confrontation and apparent contradiction of their mutual being is the Absurd(1).

Despite this ethereal definition, the Absurd manifests to our perception in the most common of ways. It can strike anyone, and at any time. While standing on a street corner, say, it can reveal itself to a young man. He sees apparitions all around him. Humans, I’ve heard them called. Ghosts of emotion and opinion; robots of flesh and bone, crawling about on a rock hurtling through space. This rock is a cosmic speck, within a speck of a cosmos. They move with purpose, ambitions; draped with the right coloured fabric to cover their flesh. They enter whirring knots of metal to roll down wounds cut into the soil, all to arrive on time with dozens of other machines of blood and ligament. They all do something there; they perform an assigned function and give their time to earn an ethereal marker of value. They exchange this marker for fuel to power the machine they inhabit, so it won’t shut down or wither away. They, these “humans”, take this fuel back to their dwelling place, where they consume it in ritualistic unison with another of their kind. This other, they mould themselves to please, they avoid certain thoughts, certain actions so that they won’t leave, or experience pain. They change themselves to please another, and so the other will forget who they really are, and, maybe, so they can forget themselves.

But for what? Don’t they realise death bites their heels? What if it did not? They tip their hats and enslave themselves to the whims of the masses to avoid a label of oddity, but who will remember them when they’re dead? No one. Whatever they achieve will ultimately mean nothing, so why do they do it at all? This confrontation; this taunt line of contradiction is the Absurd, and this slipping of the cultural veil is one of its many manifestations.

This is our condition; the eternal juxtaposition of our quest for a purpose with the unreasonable silence of the universe. In light of the facts Camus presents, he claims we have three options:

The first is suicide. Yes, dear reader, you read that right. Physical Suicide allows you to escape the Absurd, for you cannot experience the nausea of existence if you experience nothing at all. This option cuts out our quest, and thus ends our perception of the Absurd, as the Absurd is, in fact, the relationship between the two halves of the aforementioned juxtaposition, and suicide knocks out the first of those halves. Camus does not like this option, however, because it doesn’t solve the problem and thus allow you to live a life worth living. Rather, it ends any possibility of ever finding happiness as, clearly, it ends your life, and takes no steps towards any solution. Committing suicide to avoid the Absurd is like moving to a different house because of a leaky tap: The problem has not been solved, and you have prevented any solution from appearing or being implemented(2). Simple, is it not? Don’t kill yourself.

The second option is Philosophical Suicide. Have you ever met a man who believes something so firmly that nothing can dissuade him? You prove him wrong through logic, facts, statistics; you give him pragmatic arguments as to why he shouldn’t think that, but he believes on, because he must. This man has committed Philosophical Suicide, meaning he has chosen something to believe and seeks not to learn more or refine what he thinks he already knows. He has voluntarily reached the limit of his intellectual development, but in so doing shielded himself from the Absurd. It cannot reach him, because he has turned his back to it, so to speak. The Philosophically Deceased fool themselves into a pseudo certainty, giving a sense of meaning and truth to their lives to ward of the Absurd. This option provides a false destination to our search, and thus allows us to ignore the silence of the universe. I personally advocate for a Leap of Faith in the vein of Kierkegaard, but that’s for another essay. Camus rejects this solution however, as it could be used to justify any belief system and any course of action, as well as its inherent intellectual dishonesty and infuriating naivety.

This brings us to our third option, and that is to embrace it; to embrace the Absurd, to revel in it, to make it a part of one’s self. The Absurd is the split between our search and the eternal lack of any destination; thus, by making the search into the destination, you negate both. The lack of meaning, and the never-ending quest to find it, become the meaning and purpose. In his essay, Camus says that the struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart(1). The pursuit of meaning and truth become the meaning of your life; you will never find either, but the destination is the journey.

But….This feels naive, doesn’t it? All this existential bravado is effortless to shout in a short work of philosophy, but can you even whisper it in your darkest moments? If I am being intellectually honest, I don’t know if I can. Camus understands this; he understands the enormity of the task. These people who manage to embrace the Absurd, to make it a part of themselves and thus rob it of its power, to Camus these are Absurd Heroes, for they have done the only truly worthwhile thing of this existence; and that is to find happiness amongst the rubble.

In his essay, Camus presents Sisyphus as the Absurd Hero. The myth goes that Sisyphus was the wisest man on Earth, or a king, or both; it varies, and what I am about to tell you is simply one variation. One day Death came with chains to bind Sisyphus and take him to the underworld, but he convinced Death to first test out the chains on himself. These chains worked, and Death was unable to fulfil his duty, so Sisyphus went on living his life.

When the gods found out about this defiance of their power, they damned Sisyphus to an eternity of rolling a boulder up a hill, only to have it roll back down to the bottom as it reaches the top. His punishment was eternal, pointless and brutal labour. Sisyphus was condemned to a fate of meaningless and futile work. Camus draws a similarity between the fate of Sisyphus and our condition, for just as Camus’ Absurd Hero, all that we do will be reversed, and even if it is not, our labours have no inherent value to begin with. What? You go to work to earn money? You’ll have to spend that money one day, and whatever you spend it on will not last. Thus, the money itself cannot be the goal, nor what you wish to attain by its presence.

But, Sisyphus was not condemned to melancholy or self-pity. Camus says that we should imagine Sisyphus happy, content in his task, and enjoying it for its own sake. We should imagine him smiling as he walks down the hill after his boulder, for he has made it his passion. He knows every scrape, every crevice on the rock, and he revels in predicting its decent. When Sisyphus embraces the Absurd, he can live happily in defiance of the god’s condemnation, for they have no power over him when he decides his own meaning and makes his destination into the journey.

I do not like this analogy, however. How realistic is it really to imagine this? Even if it were possible for a man of god-like fortitude to embrace the Absurd in that situation, could you? I know I could not. No, the bar Sisyphus sets is too high, and his condition too abstract, for it to be of use to us as we navigate our own hill and boulder.

Instead, I present to you my Absurd Hero: SpongeBob Squarepants. The world SpongeBob inhabits is far closer to our condition and his attitudes: far more attainable.

SpongeBob exists in an ambiguous limbo of space and time. Size and distance are entirely malleable, constantly fluctuating as our hero’s circumstances vary. Thus, for SpongeBob, his perception of reality is entirely unpredictable, the laws that apply in one moment may not apply in the next. He has no certain, universal absolutes to trust in. Time appears not to pass in any reliable sense either, the show has been running since 1999, but no time has passed in Bikini Bottom. Even more bizarrely, the events of one episode have no bearing on the next, as though reality is reset each time SpongeBob sleeps. Nothing he does one day will last, nothing he achieves will alter his destination or condition. He has no cosmic references or universal absolutes to rely upon, and so nothing he can trust to manipulate his existence. SpongeBob is without any certainty or foundation of truth, just as we are.

Even if SpongeBob ignores this cosmic ambiguity, his carnal condition is miserable. He works in a dead-end job, with no prospects of anything else except more meaningless work at the same dingy establishment. His boss is demeaning and sees him as little more than dirt-cheap labour in practicality. SpongeBob’s only co-worker is both outrightly rude and self-righteous while discouraging our hero from being anything but. Even when he finishes for the day and gets to go home, he is met by nothing except an animal and an otherwise empty, silent house. His only friends outside work are a mentally challenged neighbour who clearly has no other options, and an overachieving member of another species who sees SpongeBob as merely someone to impress with her brilliance, nothing more.

The one thing our hero truly desires, and the thing that would allow him to escape his condition, he fails time and again to attain. His boating license would be SpongeBob’s way out of Bikini Bottom, it would allow him to see himself as a man, and demand at least a morsel of respect from those around him. He strives for it, dreams of it, but it endlessly eludes his grasp.

SpongeBob’s existence means nothing; there is no point to his life. He will work at the Crusty Crab until he grows old, never achieving any more than he already has. He earns money, but to what end? He has no wife to spend it on, no children to raise. Nothing he does will outlast him, and even if it did, it wouldn’t last forever. His friendships are empty, and they too will fade away in time, if time manages to pass at all, that is. If it does not, his existence is simply the same pointless day on repeat. Sometimes my days feel the same.

This is our condition; we just ignore it when possible. The Veil slips sometimes though, doesn’t it? Now and then, the Absurd manifests before you. Suddenly, it all seems pointless, contradictory, and unstable. At a party the noise is overwhelming, it presses upon you, crowding your mind. You open your eyes, all around you the robots are smiling, laughing, but it’s a farce. There’s sweat on their brows; the smiles are forced. Why are they there? Why are you there? There’s no point. It’s an endless wheel with no destination. Achieving one goal leads to another, then another and another, ad infinitum. You wake up, you work, you consume, you retire, then you die. That’s what you will do, and that’s what SpongeBob will do. But we feel like something must matter; it must all mean something, right? It appears not; the universe seems entirely indifferent about our existence.

We frown, close our eyes and block our ears to this absurdity, and we suffer for it, but SpongeBob smiles. He smiles, and he laughs because he has embraced it; because he is the true Absurd Hero. Our hero takes no care for the future for he knows it is out of his control, the instabilities of his reality don’t faze him; their darkness cannot even touch him. The gruelling manual labour is his pleasure, his passion, for he has made it his thing. SpongeBob revels in the work, he knows the ins and outs of the job, and doesn’t do it for the money. No, SpongeBob does the work for the pleasure of the work itself, nothing more, and that’s why he is happy.

SpongeBob’s life means nothing, he has no real future, and the goals he does have elude his grasp, but he doesn’t care. His heart is filled by the struggle toward the heights, and he is satisfied.

My Absurd Hero has defied the gods, made the boulder his companion and mastered the spatula. SpongeBob chooses to make what others would see as a means to an end, an end unto itself. His destination of happiness and satisfaction is his journey and labour to find it. No demeaning boss, insulting co-worker, mediocre friends or endless line of meaningless tasks can break our hero, for he, as we all must, has embraced the Absurd.

And so, as we climb our hill and flip our patties, let us remember our Absurd Heroes and the example they set. Embrace the Absurd, wrap it around yourself, make it an old friend. For when you do, you make its power your own. Oh, and please, dear reader, don’t forget to smile.

By Isaac Reeves, all rights reserved

Bibliography:

1. “The Myth of Sisyphus” By Albert Camus

https://www2.hawaii.edu/~freeman/courses/phil360/16.%20Myth%20of%20Sisyphus.pdf

2. Episode #87 of Philosphize This! with Stephen West

http://philosophizethis.org/sartre-and-camus/#more-1046

3. I also drew a lot of inspiration from “Why We’re Fated To Feel Lost — The Philosophy Of Albert Camus” by Pursuit of Wonder

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iTW3a37ap2o

4.The picture

https://wallup.net/vaporwave-spongebob-vhs-run-squarepants/