Albert Camus was twenty-nine, working in Nazi-occupied Paris, when he wrote The Myth of Sisyphus. His opening question: given that life has no inherent meaning, what justifies continuing?

His answer wasn't optimism. It wasn't faith. It was something harder.

The absurd, for Camus, is the collision between our demand for meaning and the universe's silence in response. Not meaninglessness itself — that's just the ground we're standing on. What destroys us is the refusal to accept it.He called the person who could hold this clearly — who could see the futility and push anyway, without the promise of a summit — the absurd hero.

And his central claim, the one that still lands like a provocation: we must imagine Sisyphus happy.

Not resigned. Not defeated. Happy in the specific sense of someone who has stopped outsourcing their meaning to outcomes.

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