In The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus discusses what he calls the absurd. In order to motivate and understand a little of the absurd, I will lay out the experience that could be familiar to you from the times of quarantine. Quarantine subjected many of us to undesirable periods of loneliness. Whereas we usually spent Saturday evenings going out to eat with friends, we found ourselves getting food alone. After a couple of weekends, this activity along with other lonely activities became very old very quickly. Quarantine provided us with a unique opportunity to be too alone with our thoughts. The boredom of browsing social media, watching a movie, and going to sleep all alone all the time drove us to ask questions about our own existence. It became almost effortless to relate to Camus—us noting “the absence of any profound reason for living, the insane character of that daily agitation, and the uselessness of suffering” (p. 6). We started to wonder what was the possible purpose to our loneliness. The underpinning of why loneliness during quarantine was so dramatic and viscous was because there were times we could see other people in the midst of our loneliness; yet with us being all alone, we begun to wonder what purpose they had in our existence. It became possible to view others with Camus’s perspective on a common man: “A man talking on the telephone behind a glass partition; you cannot hear him, but you see his dumb show: you wonder why he is alive” (p. 15). We saw others in the quarantine as some creatures performing some task, separate from us. They are so unassociated with us—how could they relate to our existence? Multiple of these experiences greet us with the “discomfort in the face of man’s own inhumanity…[a] ‘nausea’” (p. 15). We most likely never experienced loneliness like we did during quarantine. Without quarantine we viewed the world differently. We found it with some measure of value, full of valuable experiences. Somehow, quarantine hid these findings. This echoes the absurd: seeking value without our ability to find it.
