July 31, 2026
No Exit from the comments
The Absurdity of Albert Camus
Camus drops ‘life is absurd,’ and the comments instantly become a philosophy food fight
TLDR: The article argues that Camus saw history — and life itself — as absurd, a view that helped set him on a collision course with Sartre. Readers reacted with jokes, praise, and outrage, with some treating “Absurdity” like an app and others fighting over whether the article totally botched Camus.
Albert Camus may have spent the 1940s arguing about meaning, history, and human existence, but in the comments, the real battle is much more immediate: is this profound, pretentious, or just being wildly misunderstood? The article revisits Camus’ big idea that life is fundamentally absurd — humans crave order, but the world gives us chaos — and contrasts his outlook with Jean-Paul Sartre’s more history-soaked worldview. There’s wartime Paris, sleepy Sartre in a theater, and a friendship headed straight for rivalry. Serious stuff. Naturally, the internet responded by turning it into a mix of book club, cage match, and meme factory.
One commenter treated Camus like a software package, asking why anyone should “download and install Absurdity” and whether it beats Buddhism or Stoicism — a joke that basically stole the show. Another went full rave review with the elegantly blunt: “That’s fucking sick.” But the mood was far from unanimous. One reader came in swinging with “This might be the worst take on Camus I’ve ever seen, wow,” proving that no discussion of a dead French philosopher is complete without someone declaring intellectual malpractice. Others tried to restore order by praising The Stranger, with one reader gushing over its vivid, hypnotic style. So yes: Camus says history is absurd, and the crowd’s reaction was to demonstrate it in real time.
Key Points
- •The article begins with an August 1944 anecdote in which Albert Camus visits Jean-Paul Sartre at the Comédie-Française during the liberation of Paris.
- •key Points? Camus and Sartre met in June 1943, became friends despite contrasting social backgrounds, and collaborated through resistance journalism and theatre.
- •The article argues that Camus’ joke to Sartre hinted at a deeper disagreement between them over history.
- •Camus’ concept of the absurd is defined as the contradiction between the human desire for reason and the perceived irrationality and meaninglessness of life.
- •According to the article, Camus rejected responses such as hedonism, faith, despair, and suicide as denials of the absurd, and instead argued for accepting life’s uncertainty and the inevitability of death.