The absurd. The confrontation between two extreme oppostites: the strong urge to find meaning and clarity in life, and the unability to achieve that goal, the sense of pointlessness and deprivation of purpose.

Is suicide a valid answer to this contradiction? More specific, if there is no meaning, or no apparent meaning, or no way to find meaning, does that mean life is not worth living? Camus states that any solution to a certain problem is not a real and valid solution unless it deals with every aspect of the underlying problem, not obfuscating or denying any part of it in any way. So suicide is not a valid solution, he postulates, since it avoids confrontation with the sisyphean ordeal of existence.

The eternal punishment of pushing a rock up a hill just to see it roll back down again, the neverending ordeal of being forced into an apparently senseless task, the whole existence being reverted to acomplishing nothing at all, forever, is a metaphore for the universe we live in, very tangible, but no more than what we empirically can observe. A Universe where We have to live the absurd confrontation, the conflict between the urge for sense and the obvious inability of the universe to provide it.

According to Camus We must pursue this absurdism to the extreme, not ever giving up, because only by doing so, we can observe the absolute beauty of this contradictory strive for meaning.