“This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity.”

This line is from Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus. He’s right. This is what that feeling is. From your birth, from your first shreds of consciousness you were an actor unaware of your place on stage. You thought the set pieces reality; you thought the plot fate. The institutions that seemed so embedded in inevitability in your youth (religions, governments, and so on) turned out to be cardboard cutouts made haphazardly and inexpertly by your fellow actors as they played along. What confusion you felt, when, as a teenager you realized the first crack in the foundation. It occurred to you in High School that, should you will it, you had the ability to abandon the stage altogether. You could, just as easily as cooking dinner or playing guitar, take your own life, and end the sufferings of the play going on around you.

At some point you began to see the props as exactly that. You stood there, confused, scared, and stunned. You became depressed, it might seem. Withdrawing from things as they became more and more evidently creations for the sake of appearances, with no authenticity or gravity to them. The world is run by children who have simply made it around the sun a few more times than the rest of us. The truths of our realities are only the informed guesses of people who have been guessing themselves. It’s a scary world to live in, and one that never justified the suffering of yourself or those around you. If there’s no gain at the end of this experience, no grand cosmic justice, why are we putting ourselves through it?

Sure, you experienced moments of joy or pleasure. But those moments were (are) peaks in an existence comprised of valleys. Transient ecstasy surely hasn’t the audacity to say it justifies pervasive suffering. A movie that steals a chuckle or two from you while being otherwise excruciating is one we would leave. Who would stay in a job that pays modestly well, but requires no shortage of personal pain, frustration and disappointment, when other job opportunities are available? By the same token, you asked, what is there in living that justifies itself? What experience, value, or meaning can be obtained that somehow makes right the starvation of children, the loneliness of existence, or the systemic oppression of victims of a genetic lottery? Why take part in this rewardless play that you never auditioned for when you could just easily walk off stage?

Still, in recognizing the props for what they were, you decided that, if you weren’t going to walk off, you needed to play along. And sometimes you fall back into the illusion that these cutouts are real, and are important. Sometimes you feel the phantom of what these props are meant to portray, and you begin playing the part right along with the illusion. But you still know, and you always wake up from the somnambulist habit you long for. You always see some imperfection around you, screaming at you the illusory nature of your reality. And beneath that stage, in the imperfections, the handmade edges of “truth”, there is always that low, droning voice asking you one question.

Why are you still here?