Camus and the Psychology of Meaning

"The French writer, Albert Camus, was 'a moralist who insisted that while the world is absurd and allows for no hope, we are not condemned to despair.' Zaretsky, in A Life Worth Living, portrays Camus as a moralist who emphasizes the urgent need to create meaning in a world devoid of it. Camus resisted moralizing from above and instead sought to engage directly with reality, insisting we must invent meaning rather than despair."

"Camus, like Nietzsche, rejected resentment and questioned the value of blind faith. Central to his struggle was the pursuit of happiness -not as superficial pleasure, but as a meaningful principle by which he could compose his life in response to an absurd world. For Camus, achieving happiness was challenging precisely because the world is meaningless. He maintained that we must actively construct both meaning and happiness as a defense against despair."

"As Camus put it: 'We do not write in order to say things, but in order not to say them.' This idea suggests that even therapy may require silence to create space for meaning. Camus preferred direct experience over abstractions, a stance that led to confrontations-including disagreements with Sartre and Merleau-Ponty and criticism from an Algerian student about his silence on Algeria."

The world can be regarded as absurd, yet despair is not inevitable; moral responsibility requires creating meaning. Happiness demands ongoing attention, active engagement, and deliberate construction rather than passive pleasure. Silence can serve as a formative space where significance emerges and may be therapeutically necessary. Rebellion paired with compassion and constrained by limits preserves dignity without embracing extremes. Direct experience is preferable to abstract systems, and personal, practical judgments can outweigh ideological purity. Constructing purpose through lived action functions as a defense against despair in a meaningless world.

Read at Psychology Today