I’m often confronted with such a thing.

When I’m stuck in traffic, coming home from university, or when I get home and look at my computer, sitting in the corner below my desk. It will often reveal itself when stimuli subside and I find myself utterly alone. It’s like all veils drop. Nothing new is produced – to the contrary: all noise subsides. What is left is the smiling semblance of a familiar friend. As it walks up towards me, its glaring, purple eyes paralyse my body, then it gently reminds me: “you’re all alone.” And then a sadness washes over me, and I marinate in it for a while, and then the illusions of the self creep up on my perceived reality again, and the narratives I tell myself structure themselves again, and we carry on.

Is this what Camus’ talked about? What he called the absurd, is that the friend who comes to visit every so often? I’m inclined to think so.

It seems it finds its place exactly where Camus predicted: the chasm between all of my desires, my fantasies, my expectations for what this world has to offer, and the brutal indifference that it displays towards me.

The buddhists seem to have thought hard about this too. Like Camus, they might even encourage that you schedule some 1-on-1 time with this familiar face. That you get to know this abyss that lives not in you, not in the world itself, but wherever you too meet.

I really liked how the MCTB book talks about buddhism as a kind of science that seeks to achieve reproducible results in the competencies of the mind. I wonder if this is part of their study and aim: to find reproducible ways to both interact with this absurdity, and deal with it in a constructive way

I’m still reading through Camus’ works and the Pali Canon, so I’ll probably update this whenever I have more insight into how to deal with this. For now, whenever it decides to visit, I get sad and wait for it to wear off, which usually happens within a day. This time, I decided to write this blog post. Who knows what I’ll do next

If you have any ideas about this sort of thing, please send them my way. I love making friends.

Best, Igor