Camus seems to be telling us that no matter what we do, we are taking part in an absurd life. To him it doesn’t matter if you’re Don Juan, an actor, or a conqueror—all your efforts sum up to no meaning. Don Juan loves one person after another but doesn’t really achieve anything. An actor successfully acts as someone else, but only for a little bit of time; after a while, everyone forgets them, so their efforts were for what exactly? A conqueror may change the course of history, but someone else will eventually change what they did—the conqueror never definitively conquers. But we got to ask—and I swear I’m not being salty about this—isn’t Camus being too pessimistic? No matter what your job is, you have presumably found yourself in a position to do that. Regardless of the circumstances that brought you there, you find some line of reasoning that satisfies you if you ask yourself: why am I here? Then if you don’t like your job, you probably have a hard time finding meaning to it. However, if you positively enjoy your job, then you’ll probably say you have a meaningful job. That’s what I think Camus is overlooking. There is a decent amount of people who do things and they have found meaning in it. Sure, maybe life as a whole is absurd, but what someone does for a living is separate.
Let’s put it this way: Camus can talk all he wants about life being absurd, but he can’t tell me that my job, career, or occupation is absurd. That second part is for me to decide. If I’m a scientist, I can see it two ways: either I’m uselessly trying to find definitive answers even though nature continues to prompt us questions after each answer, or I’m successfully (and enjoyably) developing a better understanding of nature. There is some aspect to Camus’ analysis that just seems too pessimistic. Our jobs occupy one piece of our thoughts separate from the piece that ponders about life. Life may as a whole be too ridiculous to have any meaning, but our jobs have the ability to fulfill us—distract us from the absurd, because they can be pretty cool.
