How To Live In The Present - Albert Camus (Philosophy of Absurdism)

Albert Camus was a French-Algerian novelist,  playwright, journalist, essayist, philosopher and revolutionary, who lived in the 20th century.  He wrote mainly novels, the most notable being The Stranger, The Plague, The Myth of Sisyphus,  The Fall, and The Rebel. Due to the high quality of his work, he received the Nobel Prize in  Literature in 1957.

Camus is one of the most representative figures of the philosophy of the  “absurd” or “absurdism,” a philosophical school of thought which means that human beings  exist in a purposeless, chaotic universe. We humans have a drive to find meaning in things  and where it doesn’t exist we usually try to create it. However, the universe we live in is  cold and indifferent to this quest for meaning and we will always be faced with absurd situations  where our attempts to find meaning will fail.

Hence, our lives are  meaningless and will remain so. Absurdism is different from nihilism.  Although both absurdism and nihilism consider life as meaningless, absurdism gives  you the motivation to rejoice in this fact and find your own meaning and purpose in an  otherwise meaningless and purposeless world.

Camus proposes 3 ways to approach  absurdism: suicide, faith and acceptance. Both suicide and faith can be considered as  escapes: suicide a physical escape from life and faith as a mental escape from life, as when  you have faith in something, you do not need to invest mental energy in reasoning why things are  how they are. Suicide and faith fail to solve the conflict between the human desire for meaning and  the lack of meaning which exists in this world.

Thus, the only thing which remains is acceptance.  Acceptance leads to individual freedom, you become free from the moral judgments of life,  you can create new meanings. Even though life is meaningless, according to Camus, it is  worth living and should be embraced as it is.

We are still living here and now and  have every ability to enjoy ourselves and to do so we need to live in the present  moment and make the most of it. By knowing how to enjoy the present moment, you can  more easily reach the state of acceptance and you will know how to face the  absurd. Which is why to help with that we bring you 7 ways you can make most of your  present from the philosophy of Albert Camus: Have a motivation for living Camus asks “Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?

” Camus is the philosopher who pondered the most on  the idea of suicide and, in his essay “The Myth of Sisyphus” he stated that there is but one truly  serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. When we wake up from slumber and we scroll down  our phones and see only negative news and we remember all the bad past events that happened  in our lives, we all can reach at some point the thought that life might not be worth living.  To stand up and go to your espresso machine to make your morning coffee is in itself a statement  that you are willing to push it more, that your life might be worth living and you are willing  to try to succeed again in your endeavours.

We cannot live our lives if we  do not take it step by step, savoring every present moment, having patience;  to accomplish our goals and dreams takes time and we should take it slowly, without falling into  despair. One of the most important secret keys to allow yourself to enjoy the present moment is  to learn to take it slowly. This will prevent you from getting into despair and thinking about  suicide.

No matter how bad things look like, in your personal life, in the world, there is  always a small ray of hope you can cling on to. Even if you think it is too late for you, that you  are not able to accomplish your dreams anymore, that all doors have closed for you for example,  your dream was to be a professional football player and you are now in a wheelchair, you can  find motivation to live if you think of others, if you are able to make others’s lives a  bit happier. Perhaps you have some money you can invest in a charitable foundation,  you can volunteer to help others in some way.

No matter how small your help is,  you can make the world a better place and this should be a good reason to continue  living and enjoy the present moment. 2. Be yourself at all times Camus says “Man is the only creature  who refuses to be what he is.

” We have the tendency to believe others when they  tell us who we are and we mold our personality according to their opinion. Camus draws to  our attention that in order to live in the present moment, we need to give up the urge  to fit in, the urge to accommodate ourselves according to the wish of others, that we need to  rebel against the norms which are imposed on us. We need to take ownership of  our individuality, of our human instincts and fight the absurdity of things  in order to really live in the present moment.

Nowadays, this issue has become even more  critical. Today’s social media makes us lose our natural instincts, makes us live for receiving a  few likes now and then, makes us post on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Tik Tok only what we think is  liked by others and not what really represents us. What we really need to come back to ourselves  is a bit more self-awareness, more mindfulness, more time spent on watching the clouds go  by in the sky than staring at our screens.

To be who we really are, we need to spend less  time on thinking how others want us to be, on what they expect us to be, we need to understand  that we are not defined by what we do at our work, by the work accomplishments we have or by how we  look. These are all intertwined with society, with its absurdity and, according to Camus, we need  to fight this absurdity by rebelling against it. We can rebel against it by doing  the opposite of what anyone does, by doing things that reflect more who  we are - at least from time to time.

For example, if your company organizes a small  party after work before Christmas and this party isn’t mandatory and you hate parties, don’t go  just to conform with what everyone else is doing. Rather, go straight home after work and  spend quality time with your family. Allow yourself to do the things you really  enjoy, break the norms and copy others less.

3. Live intensively Camus tells us to “Live to the point of tears. ” According to Camus, the tragic condition  of human beings is caused by the conflict between their desire for meaning and the  silence of the world, the world’s refusal to provide us with any meaning.

This conflict  gives birth to the absurd, our human condition. However, for Camus, life is worth living, even  when it has no meaning. Even more, the absurd is the beginning of life, not a dead end as  it was for Sartre and other existentialists.

This conflict keeps our soul young and rebellious,  keeps us truly living in the present moment. Precisely in that conflict, we can create a  meaning for ourselves and we can overcome despair and the suicidal tendencies. The more meaning we  create for our lives, the more intensively we can rebel against the world and the more intensively  we can live our lives, “to the point of tears”.

Camus believed that the greatness of man  is how he fights against something which is greater than himself. In order to live  your life intensively, you need to find great goals to follow, fights worth being  fought. Do not set pedestrian goals for yourself, but rather aim for something bigger, something  that makes your heart tremble with ecstasy.

For example, do not just have a goal like  “I want to be a good medical doctor”, but rather aim to be the best doctor in  your area or even in the entire country. Only the thought of you becoming the best doctor  would make you thrilled, fully motivated to give your best to your present moment, would make you  take higher responsibilities at your workplace, accept more patients, save more lives,  living your life at a frantic pace. Although in the great scheme of things  we all die and life has no real meaning, staying on the front line and  continuing to fight to save lives and live the fight intensively will make  you live the present moment to the fullest.

4. Live like a rebel According to Camus “The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free  that your very existence is an act of rebellion. ” Even if Camus could not join  the army during world war II, he was a part of the French Resistance — being  the editor in chief of an outlawed newspaper.

He fought against injustice, putting his life in  danger. Also, although born from French parents in Algeria, he criticized the unjust ways in  which French people treated the Algerians. Wherever he saw injustice, he rebelled against  it.

According to Camus, if we are unfree, then we must rebel, fight to gain our freedom,  putting all our efforts into that pursuit. Also, free people must be in a permanent state of  revolution. If they are not, if they are losing sight of that rebel state, they will start  building up walls and prisons around them.

The rights we have nowadays as  people living in free democracies were not automatically given, they  were fought for by our ancestors. We should never take for granted the freedom that  we have and we need to protect it at all costs. There is no true living without freedom, we  cannot really enjoy the present moment if we are not allowed to express ourselves freely, if  we are physically or psychologically imprisoned.

According to Camus, there is nothing  more despicable than respect based on fear. Think of all the situations when you  had to respect someone because you feared the consequences of not respecting them.  In this case, you denigrated your values, the things you stand for, in order to avoid  unpleasant situations.

For example, when your boss told you to follow a procedure which was  not ethical and you did so without argument. If you were truly following your own ethics,  if you were present with your entire being at that moment, you would have said something,  you would have told your boss the truth, that you find that procedure unethical and  you do not wish to be part of such a project. A company should not invoke  a master-slave relationship, but it should be rather a partnership between  employers and employees.

In whatever you do, take yourself with you, your values, your morality  and pay attention to what is happening around you, live in the present moment, and react, rebel  against anything which violates your moral laws. 5. Focus on practical things To quote Camus “I had only a little time  left and I didn't want to waste it on God.

” The quote belongs to Meursaults, the main  character in the novel “The Stranger” by Albert Camus. Although a character with dubious  morality, Meursaults has the quality of being extremely honest, expressing his indifference to  things like the death of his mother or if Marie, his girlfriend, loves him. He bluntly stated that  he does not want to waste his limited time on God.

He rejects the moral standards of a society  which, for example, dictates that one should grieve over the death of one’s parents. He went  so far that he even committed a crime, stating that he did it because the Sun was too bright and  too hot. Meursaults is neither moral or immoral, but amoral, showing indifference to any moral  code of society.

When he is sentenced to death, he starts to ponder that the universe is  as indifferent to human life as he was. At that moment, he makes peace with himself  and with the world. Through acceptance of this indifference, he became able to face  the absurd.

Thus, faith, the belief in God, was useless for Meursault to face the absurd, it  was only through acceptance that he succeeded. Through faith, the human being embraces  irrationality and arrives at a concept regarding life’s meaning which defies rationality.  Camus considers faith a type of suicide, namely a philosophical suicide, because faith  defies rationality, irrationality being the opposite of a philosophical argument.

To face  the absurd means to be immersed deeply in life, to face its sorrows and moral problems,  without implying religious beliefs. As we have limited time on Earth, we should  spend it living each day to the fullest and we should not spend it thinking of the afterlife,  or imaginary worlds. Camus did not believe in an afterlife, but he admitted that you can be a  Christian and absurd at the same time.

No matter if we believe in God or not, we should be anchored  in reality, courageous enough to face the good, the bad and the ugly of this life, taking  each moment as it is, dealing with it in a practical manner, without involving religion,  the supernatural or superstitious beliefs. For example, if a close one is  suffering from a severe disease, don’t just spend your time praying for  them to recover, but rather call all the best medical doctors you can find and try to  find the best remedy to save your dear one. Focus on finding practical solutions in each  present moment, deal with life as it is.

6. Accept the unpredictability of life In the words of Camus “You can't create experience, you undergo it. ” Camus believed that there is no substitute for  living an experience.

You can read all the books in the world, but the knowledge you would get from  them would be small compared to the knowledge you can get from a real life experience. Camus  had a difficult life, he was born in a poor neighbourhood in Algeria, he was part of the  French resistance fighting Nazis in the World War Two, working for an outlawed newspaper and  after the war he fought for European integration. Besides that, he had a tumultuous love  life and he died in a tragic car accident.

No matter who we are, life has a way to sometimes  undermine all of our plans. We have no idea when a tragedy can come into our life, we might get  hit by a truck, lose our life in a car accident like Camus,or find one day we have cancer or lose  all of our possessions due to a natural disaster. It is vain hubris to believe we can be in  full control of what is happening to us.

That is why it is important to  let loose, to learn to relax, to be comfortable with the uncomfortable  events which might happen to us. You are not the one who creates those experiences,  you just undergo them. You need to learn how to deal with your attachments and learn to have  fewer expectations, learn to be more flexible.

You can make a list with the things that you can  control and things which you cannot. For example, you might find out that you can control how many  hours you can invest in preparing for an exam or how many hours you can allocate at work  for learning a particular piece of software, but you cannot control the problems that you will  face; how many sections you will have difficulties understanding, your overall performance after  learning, or how your professor or boss will perceive your efforts and how they will reward  them. Invest all your thoughts and efforts in learning or doing the work and not at all  in worrying about what the outcome will be.

Maybe the school assignment will be too difficult  for you or you will discover that software is more of a struggle to learn than you have the  capacity for, or that your professor or boss will give you bad feedback because they were in a  bad mood at that time. That should not worry you, what you need to focus on is what you  can control. You cannot have control over everything that happens to you, but you need to  put all of your efforts into what you can do.

7. Find happiness in every phase of your life In our final quote from Camus for this video, he says “Autumn is a second spring  when every leaf is a flower. ” The quote is said by the character Jan in Camus’  play - “The Misunderstanding”, written in 1943 in the style of Greek tragedies and focused on  the concept of the absurd.

One of the main ideas of the play is that life does not distinguish  between those who pursue a ‘bad’ path and those who pursue a ‘good’ path, life is equally cruel  to the innocent and to the criminal. No matter how moral we are, how worthy we are, life will  carry us all towards destruction, towards death. Nowadays, social media, the movies we watch  and songs that we watch and listen to, they all seem to glorify youth, beauty, and vitality,  qualities which seem to coincide with the “spring” and “summer” seasons of our lives.

Usually, we are  beautiful and have a lot of vitality when we are living the first half of our lives. As we grow  older, we get more knowledgeable and many of us become more successful, we earn more money, but we  also get more wrinkles and our body gets weaker. Even at this stage of our lives,  we still need to enjoy our lives, to savor each present moment, all  the colorful leaves in our lives.

The older we get, the more we can get in  touch with our inner beauty and wisdom and we should share them with the new generation.  We can discover new ways of self expression, a new identity, new forms of enjoying life.  Instead of focusing on the wrinkles around our eyes, we should focus on the wisdom which  came with them, on the lessons we learned in life and we should work hard in making use  of them to make the world a better place.

If you are now in your late 40s, in your 50s or  60s, it is safe to consider that you are probably in the autumn season of your life. At this point,  you should have probably a direction in your life, you should have a base on which you can rely on, be it a career or a business. You are a  knowledgeable person, with already many years of experience and you are able to pass this knowledge  and experience on to the new generations.

Some people at this age start to feel depressed  that the most vital part of their life has already passed, that they no longer conform to beauty  standards the way they once did, that they cannot run marathons as when they were young. However,  there are still many things to enjoy in life: great moments with their partners, with their  children, grandchildren or nephews and nieces, the feeling of pride to be in charge of critical  projects at work, the quiet evenings when they can stroll around a lake or enjoying a  long and deserving holiday at a resort. Every age comes with its benefits, we just have to  know which they are and make the best out of them: look at the full half of the glass, not at the  empty part.

Living your life to the fullest involves knowing how to savor each season  of your life in its own unique way. If you enjoyed this video, please make sure to  check out our full Philosophies for Life playlist and for more videos to help you find success and  happiness using ancient philosophical wisdom, don’t forget to subscribe.  Thanks so much for watching.