What Are We Really Waiting For?

Hello, curious souls. Grab your favorite drink ☕️, your weekly intellectual pause is here.

Let’s begin…

Most of us spend our days leaning forward into what hasn’t arrived yet. We often tell ourselves that life will make more sense when we finish school, when we’re done with university, when we land that job, when we fall in love, or when we settle down, we’ll finally “have time.”

Tomorrow always seems like the container where we think meaning will finally be stored. The horizon always seems to hold the answers, so we keep walking toward it. But then, there comes a point when the horizon keeps eluding, and it’s always beyond our reach. So, we’re forced to ask: what exactly are we chasing? I’m sure you must’ve had such a moment.

Albert Camus captures this absurdity in The Myth of Sisyphus. He writes:

This is a profound reflection on the human condition and the concept of time. 

Camus suggests that for much of our "unillustrious life," we let time carry us. We live without truly thinking about the passing moments. This is a passive state, where we're simply swept along by the current of life. We rely on routines and habits to navigate the days, and we don't feel the weight of time's passage.

It is when life feels like it’s unfolding naturally, almost automatically. It's a comfortable and unexamined way of living. And Camus doesn’t like this idea.

That’s why he argues: 

This is when we become aware of our own mortality and the finitude of our time. This is when we become conscious of time’s weight. We see that our tomorrows are finite. We realise that “later on” is a fragile invention and “when you are old enough” ends in the brute fact that eventually, you will not be at all.

The second part of the excerpt, "we live on the future," is an indictment of passive existence. Camus points out how we constantly defer our happiness and understanding to a future that may never come.

“Tomorrow,” “later on,” “when you have made your way,” “you will understand when you are old enough.” All these phrases, he points out, are irrelevancies because they are attempts to escape the present reality of our lives and the unavoidable truth of our mortality.

When Camus says, “it’s a matter of dying", that’s a sobering climax of his idea. Our quest for meaning is met with the silence of the universe. This is what he calls absurd.

Now, realising something like that may feel heavy, but it’s also freeing. If tomorrow is not promised, then the weight of living isn’t in waiting, but in choosing how to carry time now.

Ok, so now let’s pause for a moment. Do you remember Viktor Frankl’s quote we discussed at the beginning of this month?

In Man’s Search for Meaning, he writes:

See… did you get why I brought it up?

Not just this, towards the end of the novel The Plague, Camus himself writes:

So, both these quotes appear to be in contrast with what we are discussing, and one of them is Camus’ own.

On the surface, Camus really does look like he’s contradicting himself. In The Myth of Sisyphus, he criticizes how we live for tomorrow. How we always postpone life into the future, forgetting that death is the only guaranteed destination. He warns about not hiding behind “later.”

But then in The Plague, he admits something else: if we had no hope for the future, life would feel unbearable. That also feels closer to what Viktor Frankl wrote: people can survive the hardest suffering only if they believe in a better tomorrow.

So what’s going on?
To understand, we have to pick up the nuances.

In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus is talking about ultimate or metaphysical hopes. That is to say, when one believes that there’s some ultimate attainable meaning in the universe, or that suffering will be justified by some final reward. He calls that self-deception. For him, it’s a way of escaping the truth that life is absurd and meaningless.

In The Plague, however, the hope he describes is not metaphysical but human. It’s the longing for tomorrow, for reunion, for survival. It’s fragile and temporary, and it does not erase death. The hope there is not a denial of absurdity but a way of living within it. It’s a refusal to collapse into despair.

Frankl, meanwhile, also shares a similar sentiment. For him, looking to the future is not a form of escapism; it's a psychological necessity. It’s the very mechanism that gives life meaning and makes it bearable. The future, in this sense, is not a place to defer happiness but a necessary horizon that gives our present actions and suffering a reason.

So, it’s not exactly a contradiction. Camus is ultimately asking us to confront our reality, not to deny it. 

In The Myth of Sisyphus, he argues that this means embracing the absurdity of the present. In The Plague, he shows that this can also mean a determined and hopeful fight for a better future, even when facing an absurd and devastating present.

So, whose idea aligns with what you believe? Or when you understand the nuance, you think both are plausible?

That’s all for this week.

Enjoy your weekend. Will talk again next week.

Until then
Stay curious

Zaid