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As feeble as it sounds, I disagree with absurdist philosophy, but my arguments will naturally be less well-constructed than The Stranger. This warrants a re-read for sure because one simply can't both understand the story of The Stranger, and responding to those arguments, in the same session. I'm firmly in the Nietzschean camp of embracing life in its strangest and hardest problems, using creativity and the intellectual life to transcend life's sufferings.

The central question is, of course, whether death gives life meaning or strips it of all meaning. Absurdism is, of course, a valid philosophical claim, but that's also why I think it can be dangerous to think too much about this stuff, especially as a young person, when you should be grounded in the rules and practicalities of the world, to attempt to become a good citizen and make something out of your life. The standard life goal of 'making something out of your life', of course, seems heavily restricted by bounded rationality, since, philosophical scrutiny of the world may yield a conclusion of absurdism which is completely valid.

After all, what's wrong with the simple rule of thumb of enjoying your time on earth while it lasts?

Does the fact that I will eventually finish eating my delicious chocolate bar, give it meaning, or does it make the act in itself meaningless? I guess you could start from the axiom of diminishing marginal utility - where having an infinite chocolate bar eventually yields negative utility anyway, so it's necessary to have a limited chocolate bar. However, I guess Camus would respond to this argument, by pointing out that you can always stop eating at the point of satiation - that's why he claimed that the only philosophical question is the question of suicide.

The question now becomes why didn't Camus practice what he preached, and committed suicide.

Coincidentally, I'm currently binging the Shelly Kagan lecture series on death, which is highly relevant for this reading of 'The Stranger'. I guess absurdism assumes physicalism, which of course, shouldn't be taken as a given. To make absurdist claims, I think one should first make the case against mind-body dualism - does the soul exist? If it does, death is not the be all and end all.

The narrator of The Stranger has now quickly become one of my favourite characters in literature. He commits the same crime as Raskolnikov - killing a man - but they differ wildly in their response to the crime. The Stranger finds his own twisted form of redemption in death (which also turns out to be society's brand of punishment), but Raskolnikov finds redemption in punishment and Christ.

It also seems that absurdism is now being observed among the Chinese youth in the ÌÉƽ movement, triggered by mass youth unemployment.

1 of my favourite moments was the 'memorizing his prison cell' game which he used to pass the time. Lmao. How many people are just doing idle shit every day like memorizing their prison cells, even though they're not in prison? A cautionary tale.

Finally, heat is a key theme in The Stranger. I don't know quite what Camus had in mind for the theme of heat, but I can see that the narrator becomes delirious and makes his biggest slip-ups (e.g., the murder itself) in the face of heat. Currently, I interpret heat as the distractions of life (e.g. shitty friends that one lets into one's life) that causes one to lose one's rationality and make huge mistakes. These fuckups in life cause one to become absurdist and deeply pessimistic about existence. These mistakes can be avoided reasonably though. For example, 1 key lesson I learned from CBT is to identify your triggers and thus putting yourself in a good place to avoid those triggers. One can avoid heat. The narrator should've stayed in the beach hut when he saw that it was hot outside, which makes him susceptible to rash decisions. But then, that's just my interpretation.