For anyone who likes the video: definitely read The Myth of Sisyphus by Camus. Exurb1a does a solid job summarizing it, much better than most YouTubers, but skips a lot in order to keep the video short. It’s a very accessible book, especially if you skim the Kierkegaard stuff, and the core of it is strenuously punk and badass.
Of note: Camus doesn’t just think you should live in defiance of a meaningless universe. He argues that you should live as long as possible, experience as much as you can, repeatedly do what you love most even to the exclusion of everything else. Absurdism is not mere hedonism nor optimistic nihilism; its rebellion is tenacious, passionate, intentional, and incapable of passivity.
For a followup read, I recommend Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks, which is a great crash course in staring into the abyss.
I'm going to die and it will be the best part as I will be rid of the infinite misery and suffering of life, assuming my last moments of consciousness do not last for all eternity reliving the pain in the prospective my dying mind!
Absurdism is pushing the boundaries as much as possible within the framework of a traditionally recognized media, art, performance art, movies, shows, whatever.
A great example of this is many of the pieces done by Marina Abramović particularly the rhythm series (btw performance art has some of the most bizarre pieces out there, highly recommend looking into it sometime), or any of her proposed pieces. The whole point of absurdism is a situation that is not physically conceivable. Or outside the bounds of normality to such an extent that it enters a new plane of reality. You could argue that it may even be a hyper-reality.
The point is to demonstrate the arbitrary nature of our lives, everything around us, and how we define it. It's not that nothing matters, it's that everything surrounding us has no inherent meaning outside of our commonly accepted frame of reference.
TL;DR absurdism isn't just nihilism, it's meta nihilism. Everything matters, but the problem is nobody knows why anything matters, it's entirely manufactured. There is no set or explained reason for any one thing being any particular way.
i mean, in philosophy, if you go far enough nothing matters at all anymore ever, so everything is just nihilism if you think hard enough about it.
regardless of that, which is definitely an interesting point of discussion, this is a post in 196, about a meme, so i feel like i'm justified in that one.
Wrong absurdism. Though it is related, absurdist fiction also deals with the lack of inherent meaning per absurdism. You use a level of confidence to say absurdism isnt about a lack of inherent meaning that i believe is entirely unwarranted.
Absurdism is the philosophical theory that the universe is irrational and meaningless.
Camus, however, denies that there is an answer to this question, and rejects every scientific, teleological, metaphysical, or human-created end that would provide an adequate answer. Thus, while accepting that human beings inevitably seek to understand life’s purpose, Camus takes the skeptical position that the natural world, the universe, and the human enterprise remains silent about any such purpose. Since existence itself has no meaning, we must learn to bear an irresolvable emptiness.
Absurdism is the philosophical theory that the universe is irrational and meaningless.
in it's most extreme form yes, similar to how nihilism works in it's most extreme form, however the difference here is that we aren't talking about an explicitly sterile environment, unfortunately we live in the real world, and as evidenced by this post. My description probably conveys more accuracy and meaning, than the philosophical definition of it, in this case at least.