Almost every person must go through the stage where they doubt life, where they don't know who they are, what they are, where they are going, and certainly not where it all came from. Every person, whether spiritual or materialistic, will ponder death more than once or twice in their life. Almost every person tries to imagine at least once in their life what it's like to be dead, where we go after death, if at all. Albert Camus defines an "absurd man" in his book "The Myth of Sisyphus" as a person who has understood, grasped, and digested that death awaits them in the end and that life is meaningless. Camus claims that from the moment a person grasps this, their actions, speech, and entire way of life change without them noticing.
In his book, “The Myth of Sisyphus,” Albert Camus announces in advance that he will not give any answer to the question of the meaning of life, but will only speak for the facts known to him as a philosopher investigating this matter, and he also stated that he does not take any position of faith one way or another. The book opens with a shockingly extreme sentence in which Camus asks whether it is worth committing suicide or not. He ponders the meaning of life but does not answer it. He calls this matter “spiritual distress.”
Sisyphus, a character from Greek mythology, was a man who committed murder. Zeus, the god of heaven himself, imposed a punishment on Sisyphus – to roll a huge boulder up a mountain and spend the rest of his life doing so. Since every time the boulder reached the top of the mountain, it rolled back down, Sisyphus’s labor was cyclical, pointless, and frustrating. This is where the term “Sisyphean labor” comes from.
Workaholics, daily dramas, running around, arguments, fights, wars, corruption and more and more. The escape from death is immense. It could be said that almost everyone is busy escaping without knowing it. At the same time, they are busy committing more or less slow suicide.
Why are most of us suicidal from birth?
Anyone who is not busy living is busy dying. Ironically enough, it is only from the moment we deal with death that we begin to live. Running back and forth from dramas that have happened at work, at school, or at home, we will not gain an understanding of the meaning of life. There must be a very surprising stop. When everything stops for a moment, only then can we try to decipher the meaning of life. For those of you who do not spend most of your time meditating or deeply contemplating life, those of you who are indeed workaholics, lovers of arguments and small dramas every day, look in the mirror and try to understand how this escape borders on suicide. For a moment, you may realize that you are the absurd people Camus is talking about.
Camus: “There is only one serious philosophical problem: suicide. To judge whether this life is worth living, or not, means to answer the fundamental question of philosophy.”
From the moment we realize that there is a belief in this question, we understand that there is a power stronger than us, stronger than us, we are the power that is able to ask this question, and therefore the answer often seems clear – our choice is to live. If Camus himself had not inhaled and exhaled from the same power that we are inhaling and exhaling at this very moment, this book probably would not have been published because he would have ended his life long before. Each and every one of us should ask this question at least once in our lives – whether it is worth living this life, or not – and this will help some of us stop running away from this pure thing called life. It is better to devote several hours, days, months or years to this question in order to find a complete, internal and pure answer to it. Only then will we be able to read a heavy book like “The Myth of Sisyphus” with a satisfied smile.
Camus was a writer and philosopher without grace. If he had had a few more years to live he would probably have become a spiritual believer. With all his attempts to thwart faith, in the end, his conclusion about Sisyphus was:
“I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! Man always returns and finds his burden. But Sisyphus teaches us the supreme loyalty, which denies the gods and lifts rocks. He too believes that all is well. This world, now that it has no master, does not seem to him barren or worthless. Every grain in this stone, every mineral shimmer of this night-drenched mountain is in itself a world. The very struggle for the peaks is enough to fill a man’s heart. We must imagine Sisyphus happy.”