Camus said "There is only one really serious philosophical question, and that is suicide. Deciding whether or not life is worth living is to answer the fundamental question in philosophy. All other questions follow from that."
He pondered this topic in his essay, The Myth of Sisyphus. Lest we forget, Sisyphus was the dude condemned by the gods to ceaselessly roll a rock to the top of a mountain only to have it roll back down. The gods believed there was no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.
Strike a chord?
In fact, Camus says "The workman of today works every day in his life at the same tasks, and his fate is no less absurd."
Camus' reflections originate from his theory of the absurd. He believed there is no provable, acceptable answer to the question: "What is the meaning of life?" Therefore the absurd is the conflict created between our drive to ask this question and the ultimate inability of getting an answer.
He makes the question of suicide more dramatic by rejecting the concept of an after life as false hope. Nietzsche said that hope is evil. That it is the reason why humans let themselves be tormented - because they anticipate an ultimate reward. Camus built on that, saying that hope is disastrous for humans because it leads them to minimize the value of this life except as preparation for a life beyond.
More spice for the stew: "It is absurd to continually seek meaning in life when there is none, and it is absurd to hope for some form of continued existence after death."
Camus felt we have to accept an awareness of death to open ourselves to the riches of life, that the death of hope allows us to focus on what one has, what one knows. A living in the now kind of thing.
He hints that suicide may be the only rational solution to this dilemma, then goes about laying out a blueprint explaining how to live a meaningless life without committing suicide.
That's the beauty of being a philosopher, baby - you get to have it both ways.
He suggests that Sisyphus has actually reached the ultimate conclusion by accepting his fate. That each time Sisyphus begins to move the rock again, "he is superior to his fate. He is stronger than his rock."
He says that, like Sisyphus, we are our fate, and our frustration is our very life: we can never escape it.
Therefore tragic consciousness is the conclusion of "absurd reasoning" : living fully aware of the bitterness of our being and consciously facing our fate.
Living a meaningless life without the solution of suicide means "living in full consciousness, avoiding false solutions such as religion, refusing to submit, and carrying on with vitality and inevitability."
There is a lot to chew on in these musings and many other avenues to pursue, other schools of thought.
But if you believe in the ultimate meaningless of life, the supreme inability to "know", Camus' recipe for survival is not a bad one.
Suicide is kind of a dead end.
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