Camus opens his most famous essay with a sentence that stops you cold: there is only one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. He is not being morbid. He is asking the most honest question he can: if life has no inherent meaning — and he was convinced it does not — then is it worth living at all? The whole of The Myth of Sisyphus is his sustained, hard-won answer, and the answer is yes.
To get there, he first names the enemy: the absurd. It arises, he argues, from a collision. On one side is the deep human need for meaning, order, and clarity. On the other is a universe that offers no reply — silent, indifferent, giving us no cosmic purpose. The absurd is not a property of either alone but of their meeting. And crucially, Camus insists it cannot be resolved. Any attempt to dissolve it — whether by ending your life or by leaping to religious faith that pretends the gap has closed — he regards as a kind of evasion, even 'philosophical suicide.'
RevoltWhy Sisyphus is happy.
What is left, once you refuse both escapes, is revolt — and this is Camus's real contribution. To revolt is to keep living fully, lucidly, and defiantly in the face of the absurd, without pretending it isn't there and without giving up. He reaches for the Greek figure of Sisyphus, condemned by the gods to roll a boulder up a hill forever, only to watch it roll back down, for eternity. It is the image of perfectly meaningless labour. And yet Camus ends by insisting we must imagine Sisyphus happy: in owning his fate, in filling his heart with the struggle itself, he becomes free.
Camus was careful to distinguish himself from both nihilism and existentialism, and had a famous public falling-out with Sartre. He was not only a philosopher but a great novelist — The Stranger and The Plague remain widely read — and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957. His life was cut short in a car accident in 1960, at forty-six. But his central challenge endures: to live without appeal, to love a life that promises nothing, and to find in that refusal of despair a strange and durable joy.