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Is There A Purpose For All This? The Absurdity Of This World And The Search For The Meaning Of Life

Peter Burns
Renaissance Man World
25 min readJul 16, 2019
Sisyphus

On Absurdity and the Need for Meaning

The Ancient Greeks used to tell the story of Sisyphus, a man who tried to cheat death and defy the Gods. For this he was punished to spend all eternity in Hell, constantly rolling a large stone up a hill. When this stone was about to reach the top, it would roll down again, forcing Sisyphus to turn back and repeat the task. Sisyphus was stuck in a never ending cycle, doing a hard and pointless task that he knew he was never going to be able to finish.

French philosopher Albert Camus took this story and used it as a metaphor for life. In one of his most famous essays “The Myth of Sisyphus”, Camus described his premise on the absurdity of this world. He noted how people search for meaning, while in reality there is none. Life is just absurd, a series of random events which have no meaning in themselves.

Taking this premise, a person has three ways of dealing with this reality.

1) Suicide.

2) Taking a leap of faith.

3) Accepting the absurd.

With the first choice you escape this life, but neither for Camus or any other philosopher was that the correct answer for dealing with the nature of…

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Renaissance Man World
Renaissance Man World

Published in Renaissance Man World

Exploring the world from different perspectives.

Peter Burns
Peter Burns

Written by Peter Burns

A curious polymath who wants to know how everything works. Blog: Renaissance Man Journal (http://gainweightjournal.com/).

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