Albert Camus was a French-Algerian philosopher who built his life's work around the philosophy

of absurdism. As human beings, we are desperate for life to give us a grand, ultimate meaning or

a clear blueprint to follow. But the universe is completely silent and indifferent to what we want.

This conflict, our deep need for meaning versus a silent world, is what Camus called “The Absurd”.

Most of us spend our lives trying to fix this by constantly chasing things. Because the universe

didn't give us a blueprint, we try to buy one. We convince ourselves that we can finally be

happy if we just get a lot of money, a major career, or premium experiences. Until then,

we just try to get through the day, assuming our real life hasn't actually started yet.

But Camus argued that once you accept that life doesn't come with a built-in meaning,

you actually become free. You realize you do not need wealth, status, or some

future version of life to feel alive right now. He wrote about this in books like The Stranger,

The Myth of Sisyphus, and The Plague. His stories focus on ordinary people dealing

with normal struggles—like boring jobs and money issues—and finding freedom anyway.

For Camus, living fully was not about finding a perfect future. It was about

letting go of constant expectations and becoming more present in everyday life.

And that's what this video is about: how to live fully through the philosophy of Camus.

1. Stop Waiting for Life to Give You a Meaning In his novel The Plague, Camus introduces us

to a coastal town called Oran that is suddenly sealed off from the rest

of the world by a deadly epidemic. Almost immediately, the citizens put

their lives on hold. They treat the lockdown like a temporary pause, sitting in their homes

and waiting for the gates to reopen so their "real" lives can finally resume.

Meanwhile, the town’s leaders desperately search for the grand, cosmic meaning behind the sickness,

insisting it must be part of some divine plan. But the main character, a doctor named Bernard

Rieux, refuses to participate in any of this. When someone asks him why he works so relentlessly to

save people if he doesn't believe in a higher cosmic purpose, Rieux’s answer is radically

simple: He doesn't know what it all means, and it doesn't matter. There are sick people

right in front of him, and he has a job to do. Rieux knows that the universe does not care if

the town survives. But instead of giving up, or inventing a fake story to comfort himself,

he makes a choice. He looks directly at a silent, meaningless world, and he

rebels against it simply by doing his work. The problem is, most of us act exactly like

the trapped citizens of Oran. We obsess over finding our grand purpose. We tell ourselves,

"I will finally be happy when I find my true calling," or "My real life will begin once

the business hits that revenue goal." We put our very existence on hold, freezing up as we

wait for the universe to hand us an envelope with our ultimate mission written inside.

Camus wanted us to see that the envelope is never coming. And because that envelope isn't coming,

you are left with something much more powerful. You are left with a choice.

You have the power to look at a silent universe and say, "Fine. I will decide what matters."

So when you sit down to work, you do the task in front of you well. Not because it

fulfills some grand destiny, but because you decided to care about the work today.

When you are with people you love, stop waiting for some dramatic,

movie-like moment to make life meaningful. Put the phone down, look at the people across from you,

and choose to actually be present. Meaning isn't a revelation waiting

for you at the finish line. It is just a series of quiet, deliberate choices.

It is the choice to stop waiting, and start owning the day you are already in.

2. Kill "Hope" In his groundbreaking novel The Stranger,

Camus introduces us to a man named Meursault. Meursault is a completely detached, ordinary

clerk living in Algiers who doesn't play by society's emotional rules. When his mother dies,

he doesn't weep at her funeral because he simply refuses to lie or pretend to feel an expected

societal grief that isn't naturally there. Later, through a series of random, chaotic

events on a beach, the overwhelming glare of the sun disorients him, causing him to mindlessly

pull the trigger and shoot an Arab man. When he is put on trial, the prosecutors aren't

actually interested in the logistics of the crime. Instead, they focus entirely on his character. The

court judges him for smoking beside his mother’s coffin, and going to watch a comedy the next day.

Toward the end of the book, Meursault is sitting in his prison cell,

waiting for his execution. A prison chaplain enters, urges him to turn to God, to repent,

and to embrace the hope of an afterlife. But Meursault completely snaps. He grabs the

priest by the collar and rejects him entirely. To an outside observer, it looks like a moment

of pure despair. But for Camus, it was the moment Meursault became free. Once he stopped hoping for

rescue, God, or another life after death, all illusions disappeared. What remained was the

reality in front of him: the prison cell, the night air, and the limited time he had left.

By giving up hope for a different future, he was finally able to fully face the present.

On the surface, telling someone to "kill hope" sounds incredibly pessimistic. But

Camus meant it as a radical form of liberation. When we hope for something, we are quietly

admitting that our present moment isn't good enough. Hope relies on an uncertain

future to solve our current problems. We look at a difficult period in our lives and say,

"I just hope things get better next year," or "I hope this problem fixes itself."

Camus believed that this kind of hope is an intellectual drug that numbs the discomfort of the

present. By constantly looking at the horizon for a better tomorrow, we avoid taking responsibility

for the life we actually have right now. His solution was to stop hoping things

will magically fix themselves, and start dealing with exactly what is in front of you.

When you are stuck in a frustrating job, financial stress, or problems in a relationship,

the instinct is usually to wait and hope things somehow change. But Camus argued

that real freedom begins when you stop expecting a miracle and ask yourself a simpler question:

"If nothing about this changes tomorrow, what is the best move I can make right now?"

Once you stop relying on the future to save you, your attention returns to what

you can actually control today. 3. Embrace the Daily Grind

In his essay, The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus uses a Greek myth to explain ordinary life.

Zeus punishes a king named Sisyphus for trying to cheat death. His punishment is simple: he must

push a giant boulder up a mountain forever. Every time he gets close to the top, the rock rolls all

the way back down, and he has to start again. To the gods, this was the perfect torture

because the work never ends and leads nowhere. Camus believed modern life often feels the same.

We wake up, commute, answer emails,come home, clean the house, pay bills, sleep, repeat. Most

people cope by constantly waiting for escape — the weekend, more money, a vacation, or some

future where life finally feels easier somehow. But Camus focused on one specific moment in

the story: when Sisyphus walks back down the mountain to pick up the rock again.

Now at that moment, Sisyphus already knows the rock will fall again. He knows there

is no final reward waiting for him. But nonetheless he chooses to continue anyway.

By accepting his reality and pushing the rock regardless, Sisyphus takes away the gods’ power

to break him. That is why Camus wrote that “we must imagine Sisyphus happy.” He is happy

because he refuses to surrender to misery, even inside a repetitive and difficult life.

And Camus believed we face the same choice every day. He reduced it to a blunt question: "Should I

kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?” The point was simple. Every morning, you decide whether

to reject life or continue participating in it through ordinary actions. Making coffee, going

to work, cleaning your room, answering emails — these routines are still your life. And when

you choose to get up and make that morning coffee, you are choosing to continue instead of giving up.

So the next time you sit down to a repetitive task or handle a frustrating chore, don't let

your mind drift into frustration. Don't wish you were somewhere else. Instead, bring your

full attention to whatever is right in front of you. When you make that coffee in the morning,

don't rush through it to get to your emails. Just stand there, watch it brew, and taste it.

If you are cleaning a room, do it methodically and deliberately. If you are filling out a

spreadsheet, focus on doing it with total clarity. For Camus, living fully was never about

escaping the climb. It was about choosing how you carry the rock.

4. Prioritize the "Quantity" of the Present Over the "Quality"

In the same essay “The Myth of Sisyphus”, Camus uses the example of an actor to explain how

we should think about life. An actor steps onto a stage, plays a role for a few hours,

and then the play ends. The moment disappears forever. Now the actor doesn’t try to make

the performance last forever or save their energy for some “better” scene later. They

give themselves fully to the role while it exists. Usually, we save up for rare, "quality" moments.

The premium vacation, the VIP tickets, the Michelin-star dinner. The problem with chasing

"quality" is that it requires a lot of money and perfect timing. If you don't have those things,

you feel like you are locked out of the good life. You sit around feeling poor,

waiting for the day you can finally afford the premium version of reality.

Camus rejected that mindset. If there’s no final cosmic scoreboard, then life is not

about collecting elite experiences. It’s about participating in life as often as possible.

A hundred ordinary moments fully lived can be richer than a few expensive ones.

If you want a great social life, stop waiting until you can afford to take your partner or your

friends to a high-end restaurant to celebrate. And instead, make cheap, basic dinners in your

cramped kitchen three times a week. By the end of the year, you have over a hundred nights of

eating, talking, and laughing, versus one single night of being served by a waiter.

If you want culture and entertainment, stop feeling miserable because you can't afford

a massive music festival or expensive theater tickets. Read a massive stack of used paperbacks,

or go to a free local show, or watch a few classic films in your living room.

You do not need wealth to experience life deeply. You only need the willingness to

participate in the version of life available to you right now. The goal is not to own the

most impressive experiences. The goal is to truly live as many moments as you can.

5. Reconnect with the physical world In his unfinished autobiography, The First Man,

Camus tells the story of a boy named Jacques, who is largely based on his own childhood. Jacques

grows up in a neighborhood in Algiers where practically no one has any money. He lives

in a tiny, cramped apartment with his strict grandmother and his deaf, illiterate mother.

But Camus doesn’t write this story like a tragedy. Inside the house, there is poverty and silence.

But the moment Jacques and his friends step outside, the tone completely shifts. Pages

describing the physical thrill of the boys running down to the harbor, swimming in the Mediterranean,

eating cheap fruit, and lying on the hot sand. Out there, they were the kings of the world. Because

they had access to the sun and the ocean, they felt entirely wealthy in their physical freedom.

Camus is trying to explain that we have the definition of wealth completely wrong.

To him, real poverty is simply losing touch with the physical world around us.

Think about how most of us operate today. We measure our success entirely by the digits on

a screen, the square footage of a house, the price of a car. To accumulate those numbers,

we willingly sit inside climate-controlled rooms, beneath artificial fluorescent lights,

staring at glass screens for eight to ten hours a day. We trade our physical existence for a

paycheck, often just to save up enough money to spend one week a year sitting on a beach,

desperately trying to feel the exact sun and water that Camus engaged with every single day for free.

Camus would look at that setup and say we are the ones living in poverty.

To be clear, he wasn’t romanticizing being broke, and he knew money was necessary to survive.

But what he was pointing out that you don't need a promotion to feel the temperature of

the air. You don't need to be a millionaire to pay attention to the taste of your food, or the

shock of cold water when you wash your face. The next time you catch yourself stressing

over what you don't have, or feeling like you are falling behind in life,

Camus suggested simply returning to what you can physically touch, see, and hear. Take whatever is

right in front of you—a walk in a public park, a cheap book, a basic homemade dinner—and give

your senses to it completely. If you can still deeply experience the ordinary world around you,

you already have a baseline of wealth that costs nothing, and that no one can take away from you.

6. Rebel In 1952, after World War II, much of

Europe was poor, emotionally exhausted, and deeply pessimistic. Camus himself was also feeling tired

and depressed by everything happening around him. When he returned to the ancient Roman ruins of

Tipasa in Algeria, the weather was cold and rainy. Then the weather cleared, sunlight came

out over the sea, and Camus suddenly felt better. In that moment, he realized that the cruelty and

negativity of the world could not take away his ability to enjoy life. He later wrote:

“In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.”

He believed that life is often unfair, chaotic, and painful. But instead of giving in to the

despair, he thought the strongest response — what he called “rebellion” — was to keep

living fully and finding reasons to enjoy life anyway. He proved this throughout his own life

by throwing himself into four specific ways that require very little wealth.

First there was Sports. Camus was a passionate soccer player and spent his youth as a goalkeeper

on the rough dirt fields of Algiers. He famously wrote that everything he knew most surely about

morality, he owed to soccer. Running, playing a sport, or pushing yourself physically is a

completely free way to feel alive and present. Second is creativity. Long before he was

a Nobel Prize-winning author, Camus was writing essays in a tiny room and putting

on plays with an amateur theater group of working-class citizens. They had zero budget,

but a deep need to express themselves. So whether you are writing a story, sketching,

or making music, creating something is a direct refusal to let the chaos of life numb you.

Then third is Travel. According to Camus, travel broke your daily habits and forced you to be

fully awake and sharpen your senses. You can practice this simply by catching a cheap bus to

a nearby town, or walking down streets you’ve never seen before. It is a free way to shock

your brain out of its daily numbness. And Finally is Love and friendship.

Camus believed that loving people fiercely, sharing a deep conversation, and laughing

until your stomach hurts with a friend are the ultimate buffers against a cold universe.

When you are going through a tough time, you are expected to look defeated, to stay

up late worrying. But if you choose to play a game with friends, if you spend an afternoon

creating something just for fun, or if you explore a new place, you are staging a quiet revolt. When

you protect your ability to love and laugh over a basic, cheap meal, you are looking at a difficult

situation and saying, “You can make things hard for me, but you don't get to choose how I feel.”

And that's our video. Are you going to be changing anything about your life following the ways of

Albert Camus? And if not, why not? But until next time I’ve been Dan, you’ve been awesome and if

you enjoyed what you saw or found it helpful at all, why not check out our full philosophies for

life playlist? And of course for more videos to help you find success and happiness using

beautiful philosophical wisdom, don’t forget to subscribe. Thanks so much for watching.