In 1977, before university, I took a gap year and did what earnest young men of a certain temperament once did: I sat in libraries reading Beckett, Ionesco, Camus, Sartre — existentialism, absurdism, the literature of metaphysical despair. Life, I learned, is meaningless. God is silent. The universe is indifferent. Waiting is futile. Dialogue collapses into circularity. Action is comic. Consciousness is trapped in a void. One waits for Godot, who never comes.
It all felt very deep. And "cool."
Fifty-one years later, it mostly feels very comfortable. Or, uncomfortable. I explain.
Not intellectually comfortable — socially comfortable. Absurdism is not the philosophy of famine zones, plague years, frontier societies, civilisational builders, warriors, peasants, monks, traders, explorers, or pioneers. It is the philosophy of people who live in safe, bored, well-fed societies with leisure to stare at the ceiling and wonder why existence lacks a plot.
That alone doesn't refute it. But it radically reframes it.
Existential despair turns out not to be humanity's default metaphysical condition. It is a culturally local mood, produced by late-modern security plus metaphysical disinheritance. It emerges when survival no longer commands attention and transcendence has already been declared dead. Only then does the question "What is the point of anything?" acquire the eerie stillness of a room with nothing left to do.
The Civilisations That Didn't Get the Memo
Africans did not spend millennia paralysed by absurdity. The ancient Greek philosophers did not mutter about the meaninglessness of being. Ancient Chinese civilisation did not collapse into ontological nausea. Medieval peasants did not wake up thinking, "Existence is unjustified." Roman engineers did not stare into aqueducts wondering if water itself was an illusion. Jewish prophets did not sigh that covenantal history was pointless. Buddhist monks sought liberation from suffering, not from meaning. Indigenous cosmologies everywhere embedded human life in cosmic narratives of obligation, ancestry, land, ritual, and purpose.
In none of these cultures do we find Waiting for Godot.
Not because they were stupid. Because they were busy — building worlds, surviving winters, raising children, worshipping gods, defending borders, farming soil, founding cities, burying the dead, honouring ancestors, fearing judgment, seeking salvation, securing posterity, or simply getting through the day.
Existential absurdity is not humanity's ancient discovery. It is modernity's boutique mood disorder.
Ionesco Accidentally Admits the Game
Eugene Ionesco's play Hunger and Thirst is particularly revealing. The protagonist begins in deprivation, then suddenly receives a sum of money — and only then is free to wander, philosophise, drift, and gaze meaninglessly at existence. The play practically confesses its own sociological conditions.
Absurdism requires surplus.
You must first be safe, housed, fed, educated, bored, and unthreatened before you can declare that nothing matters. The starving do not ask whether life has meaning. They ask whether there is food. The enslaved do not ponder the absurdity of consciousness. They seek freedom. The hunted do not worry about existential alienation. They worry about predators. The bereaved do not conclude that love was meaningless. They conclude that it mattered unbearably.
Meaninglessness is not discovered at the edge of existence; it is discovered in the armchair.
This does not make Beckett wrong. It makes him parochial.
Waiting for Godot: The Play That Assumes What It Claims to Prove
Let's talk about Waiting for Godot, the sacred text of metaphysical stasis. Two tramps wait endlessly for someone named Godot, who never arrives. The waiting itself is the meaning — or rather the meaninglessness — of life. Nothing happens. No revelation. No redemption. No plot. No closure. Just endless deferral.
The joke, of course, is obvious: Godot ≈ God.
But what is less obvious is that the play does not prove that God does not come. It simply assumes it. The entire structure of the work presupposes metaphysical absence and then congratulates itself for discovering it. It is not an argument. It is a mood staged as ontology.
The play's power lies not in its metaphysics but in its atmosphere: fatigue, inertia, boredom, stalled transcendence. But those are not features of the universe. They are features of post-war European psychology — a continent exhausted, traumatised, disillusioned, spiritually hollowed, and unsure what it still believes in.
That may be historically intelligible. It is not cosmically authoritative.
Christianity, incidentally, offers a far more disturbing thesis than Beckett's: not that God never comes, but that God already came — and was ignored, misunderstood, rejected, and executed. Waiting for Godot assumes divine absence. Christianity assumes divine presence and human blindness. That is the more uncomfortable doctrine, which may explain why Beckett's feels easier.
Absurdism consoles us by saying no one is listening. Christianity unsettles us by suggesting someone might be. And that has consequences.
The Hidden Bourgeois Theology of Absurdism
Absurdism presents itself as anti-metaphysical realism — the stripping away of comforting illusions — but in fact it installs a theology of its own: the theology of cosmic indifference. The universe becomes an inert, purposeless mechanism, and human longing becomes a tragic evolutionary glitch — a biological error message flashing on a meaningless screen.
But notice: this picture itself cannot be derived from science. Science tells us how particles behave, not what existence is for. The claim that the universe has no meaning is not a scientific discovery. It is a metaphysical interpretation layered onto scientific description — and one that curiously flatters the psychological temperament of post-religious societies.
Absurdism is not the rejection of faith. It is the adoption of a new, bleaker faith — one in which nothing transcends matter, nothing answers longing, nothing grounds value, and nothing justifies hope. It does not prove this worldview. It assumes it — then aestheticises the fallout.
In that sense, absurdism is not courageously facing reality. It is liturgically rehearsing disappointment.
Why Despair Feels Profound in Safe Societies
There is a reason existential despair flourishes in wealthy, secure, post-sacramental cultures. When danger recedes and necessity relaxes, consciousness turns inward. When survival no longer structures life, meaning becomes a problem. When religion fades and tradition thins, transcendence becomes optional. When suffering becomes abstract and death is medicalised, metaphysical disorientation becomes fashionable.
Absurdism is not born in famine zones. It is born in cafés.
Again: this does not refute it logically — but it utterly undercuts its claim to universality. A worldview that emerges only in leisure societies after metaphysical collapse is not a timeless revelation about existence. It is a historically local response to spiritual vacancy.
The fact that Beckett could write Waiting for Godot means the West had already won its material battle with scarcity — and lost its metaphysical one with meaning.
The Anthropology of Meaning: Humans Are Meaning-Making Animals
Across cultures, epochs, and civilisations, humans do not ask whether life has meaning. They assume it does — and argue violently about what it is. Meaning is not an optional psychological add-on. It is the organising structure of agency itself. We act for reasons. We pursue goods. We honour obligations. We fear judgment. We seek redemption. We love. We sacrifice. We mourn. We hope. We narrate.
These are not illusions. They are the grammar of conscious life.
Absurdism's core claim — that meaning is a comforting fiction projected onto an indifferent universe — is not discovered by stripping away cultural assumptions. It is discovered by adopting a very particular one: that only what can be physically measured is real. But that assumption itself is not measurable. It is philosophical. Which means absurdism collapses into the very metaphysics it pretends to transcend.
The question is not whether meaning exists. It is whether we have good reasons to trust it.
Absurdism answers by saying: no — and now let us aestheticise the emptiness.
That is not courage. It is resignation dressed as insight.
Why No One Lives Like Beckett Characters
Perhaps the strongest argument against absurdism is behavioural rather than philosophical: no one actually lives as though life is meaningless. Beckett's characters sit, stall, dither, loop, and decay — but real people build, raise children, fall in love, care for parents, fight injustice, pursue knowledge, seek beauty, and plan futures. Even those who profess nihilism live as though some things are better than others, some actions are preferable to others, some lives are more worth living than others.
The claim that meaning is an illusion collapses the moment anyone makes a choice — because choosing presupposes value, and value presupposes meaning.
Absurdism is performatively incoherent: it cannot be lived without contradiction. It must be staged instead — hence theatre.
Existentialism as Luxury Belief
In our current vocabulary, we might call absurdism a luxury belief: an idea that carries social prestige while imposing no real survival cost on those who hold it. Only people whose lives are already stable can afford to announce that life itself is meaningless. Try telling a subsistence farmer, refugee parent, frontline medic, disaster survivor, or war-zone civilian that nothing matters. They will look at you the way one looks at a man philosophising about the illusory nature of gravity while falling off a cliff.
Existential despair is not bravery. It is boredom plus metaphysical collapse.
Christianity Didn't Promise That God Would Be Convenient
Absurdism's emotional power comes largely from the sense of divine absence — the unanswered cry, the empty heavens, the silence after prayer. But Christianity never promised that God would be obvious, convenient, comforting, or immediate. It promised instead a crucified God, a God whose presence is not coercive but invitational, whose silence is not emptiness but risk.
Waiting for Godot assumes God will never come. Christianity assumes God already came — and that this is precisely why waiting remains difficult.
One worldview declares the silence final. The other declares it temporary. One aestheticises despair. The other confronts suffering without granting it metaphysical sovereignty.
The choice is not between absurdity and comfort. It is between absurdity and hope — and hope is the more dangerous posture.
Absurdism as Historical Mood, Not Metaphysical Revelation
In the end, Beckett and Ionesco were not prophets of cosmic truth. They were chroniclers of post-war European exhaustion. Their work captures something real — not about existence itself, but about what existence feels like when inherited meanings collapse and nothing has yet replaced them.
That is a valuable diagnosis. It is not a final ontology.
The mistake was turning a psychological condition into a metaphysical verdict.
Absurdism is not what happens when one sees clearly. It is what happens when one sees only half the picture: the collapse of old narratives without the reconstruction of new ones; the loss of transcendence without the courage to rebuild meaning; the refusal of illusion without the recovery of hope.
It is a philosophy of people who have already eaten — and no longer know what they are hungry for. Ionescu was right to title his play, Hunger and Thirst.