I first suspected that existence was absurd while eating a corn dog at the Iowa State Fair. It wasn’t the corn dog itself, though that could be argued philosophically, it’s a meat tube, dunked in batter, fried to the point of blistering, and then served on a stick, all of which suggests a universe designed by either a trickster god or a Midwestern teenager.
What tipped me off, rather, was the moment a man walked by with a raccoon on a leash, wearing sunglasses. The raccoon, not the man. The man had the dead-eyed stare of someone who’d just eaten two funnel cakes and was considering a third.
There was something about that raccoon, though. The way it walked, slowly and with purpose, as if it knew something I didn’t. Something about the essential pointlessness of everything.
Camus would have understood the raccoon.
Albert Camus, the disarmingly handsome French philosopher who always looked like he’d just leaned against a lamppost to say something devastating about death, built an entire worldview on this very idea. Existence, he said, is fundamentally absurd. We’re born into a world that doesn’t explain itself, doesn’t justify itself, and definitely doesn’t come with a return policy. You’re just here. No one asked. No one checked. One day you’re finger painting in kindergarten and the next you’re applying for dental insurance and wondering if this is all there is.
Camus saw this absurdity not as a reason to curl up in a ball and weep quietly into one’s pillow, but as a prompt. A dare. He talked about Sisyphus, that poor Greek fellow condemned to roll a boulder uphill for eternity. For Camus, the moral of the story wasn’t that life is horrible but that we must imagine Sisyphus happy. This, I suppose, is French optimism. They see a man condemned to eternal labor and think, “He probably smokes good cigarettes.”
Now Heidegger, on the other hand, is like that uncle you avoid at Thanksgiving because he insists on explaining Being with a capital B using language that sounds like instructions for assembling a washing machine in reverse German.
For Martin Heidegger, the absurdity of existence wasn’t so much a punchline as it was a deep, echoing chasm. He called it the “thrownness” of existence. You are thrown into the world, not asked to be born but just flung here like a sock at a laundry basket, except there’s no basket and no one’s doing laundry.
Heidegger said we spend most of our lives fleeing from the reality of Being. We distract ourselves with Netflix, yard work, kombucha brewing, and other ways of pretending not to be aware of death. But death is always there, lurking behind the recycling bin, quietly whispering that everything we do is, ultimately, temporary.
For Heidegger, the trick was to confront this absurdity head-on and choose to live authentically. Which sounds noble, until you realize that living authentically might mean quitting your job to raise goats and write poetry about moss, only to find out that moss doesn’t pay the bills and goats are incredibly stubborn.
And then we have Simone de Beauvoir, who looked at the whole absurd spectacle and said, essentially, “Yes, life is absurd, and yes, it’s unfair, and by the way, try being a woman in the middle of all this.”
De Beauvoir added a critical layer to the conversation: the absurd isn’t experienced equally. She didn’t just stare into the void. She asked who built the void, who gets to decorate it, and who’s forced to clean it up afterward.
While Camus romanticized the idea of rebellion against absurdity, de Beauvoir said that rebellion has to include a fight against injustice. It’s not enough to recognize the meaninglessness of existence and shrug stylishly in a trench coat. You also have to do something about the fact that other people’s lives are systematically crushed under that same absurd rock.
And that, in a way, is where the raccoon comes back in.
Because if you zoom out far enough, past the fairgrounds, past the corn dogs and the livestock competitions and the terrifying ride called “The Vortex”, you start to see the whole thing for what it is. A collection of beings, thrown into this world without explanation, trying to make sense of it all. Some do it by becoming French philosophers. Others do it by putting sunglasses on their raccoons and going for walks.
The universe is not reasonable. It has no manual, no helpline, no customer service email that will respond to your cries of “Why me?”
Camus says laugh at it. Heidegger says face it. De Beauvoir says fix it.
And me? I just try to get through it without dropping my corn dog.
Join us in making the world a better place – you’ll be glad that you did. Cheers friends.