By Karen Swallow Prior
Monday, August 03, 2026
When I began teaching literature at an evangelical
Christian university almost 30 years ago, one daunting task I faced was
introducing my bright-eyed, biblically trained, often sheltered undergraduates
to modern schools of thought that undergirded some of the literary works I
assigned. One of these was absurdism.
It was important at that time for my students to
understand this philosophy in order to better appreciate the literature we’d be
reading. It’s even more important now—especially for Christians—to understand
absurdism so as to recognize how it is playing out today in real life.
“Absurd” essentially means “irrational.” As a philosophy,
absurdism confronts the inherent irrationality of life. It is most closely
associated with the 20th century French-Algerian philosopher and
novelist Albert Camus, growing out of existentialist philosophy but parting
from it in significant ways.
Existentialism posits that human existence precedes human
meaning. In other words, human beings can’t simply assume that God or the
universe will confer meaning to our existence, but rather, we are responsible
to make that meaning for ourselves. Existentialism has a long history but
gained prominence with Soren Kierkegaard, a 19th century Danish
philosopher. But the search for meaning goes back much further, of course. The
writers of the Old Testament books of Ecclesiastes and Job wrestle to find
meaning in the brevity of our lives and the depth of our suffering, for
example.
Finding and making meaning is a weighty responsibility
that absurdism rejects, saying instead that the search for meaning is futile.
Even so, we must persevere, embrace life in its meaninglessness, and even
choose to be happy. Camus doesn’t deny that ultimate meaning exists, but he
sees an unbridgeable gap between whatever meaning does exist and our ability to
know it. In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus explains:
I don’t know whether this world
has a meaning that transcends it. But I know that I do not know that meaning
and that it is impossible for me just now to know it. What can a meaning
outside my condition mean to me? I can understand only in human terms. What I
touch, what resists me—that is what I understand. And these two certainties— my
appetite for the absolute and for unity and the impossibility of reducing this
world to a rational and reasonable principle—I also know that I cannot
reconcile them.
Camus likens human existence in the face of this
inability to know the meaning of the world to Sisyphus, who in Greek mythology
was condemned by the gods to push a giant boulder up a hill only to have it
roll back down again each time, over and over, for eternity.
Instead of endless pushing of a boulder, modern people,
Camus writes, have:
Rising, streetcar, four hours in
the office or the factory, meal, streetcar, four hours of work, meal, sleep,
and Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday and Saturday according to the same
rhythm.
Human beings are made to desire meaning. The challenge of
being human within the absurdist worldview is to find meaning, even joy, in the
face of such futility. Thus, absurdism often expresses itself through dark
humor.
The most famous literary movement to grow out of this
philosophy is Theater of the Absurd, whose playwrights include Samuel Beckett
and Eugéne Ionesco. Theater of the Absurd features non-linear plots, irrational
dialogue, meaningless repetition, unceasing circularity, and a bizarre mixture
of the tragic and the comic. If life is meaningless and then you die, you can
cry about it—or laugh in the face of it all.
Popular culture has its own versions of meeting
meaninglessness with comedy. The 1999 film Office Space is often cited
as an example of absurdism expressed in the modern workplace with all its
pointless, dehumanizing rules and rituals. Even more exemplary is the sitcom Seinfeld,
“the show about nothing,” which satirizes the utter shallowness of the four
main characters, for whom the placement of shirt buttons and the death of a
romantic partner provide equal fodder for endless discussion and complaint. The
fact that the show ends on the very same note on which it began (circling back
to a conversation on said buttons)
echoes the absurdism of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting For Godot, a two-act
drama in which, as one critic put it, “nothing happens, twice.”
In literature or on television, all this is funny,
instructive even, in the Aristotelian sense of catharsis.
In real life, however, absurdism is not as lofty or
inconsequential. Indeed, while Camus offered a few possible responses to absurdism, he recognized that a
common—and potentially destructive—response is rebellion.
Rebellion against the seeming meaningless of life can
take many forms. Some—social protest, economic upheaval, philosophical
movements—require the sort of high-level, collective thought and reflection
that is the luxury of the detached and disaffected.
However, for the common, everyday person who finds no
meaning in modern life—the one who must work long hours without satisfaction or
joy in order to acquire food, shelter, and video games—there are easier, more
readily accessible outlets for rebellion.
Enter internet trolling, meme-making, and “shitposting.”
While these activities are not identical, the last covers
them all. Shitposting (sometimes more delicately referred to as “trashposting”)
is, as one source puts it, a “style of online communication
characterized by deliberately low-quality, ironic, or absurdist content, often
used for humor, provocation, or community bonding.”
This strain of absurdism derives, as The Culture Atlas explains, from “a penchant for
surrealism, irony, and dark humor.” It thrives on “creating and sharing content
that challenges conventional norms of comedy and communication.” And it
purposely cultivates an aesthetic committed to “deliberate degradation of
quality.”
In other words, the ridiculousness is the point. If
existence itself lacks meaning, at least one can get the meaning of the joke.
The more absurd, the better.
For example, during July’s America250 celebration,
President Donald Trump shared on Truth Social an image of a large crowd that was obviously fake. Some
circulated the post with comments about how low Trump’s intelligence must be to
not recognize the doctoring of the photo and to share the image as if it were
real. But this is a misunderstanding of what such a post is doing and to what
effect. An image like this isn’t being presented as real. It’s a joke—as
are more and more of the images and posts being posted by federal social media
accounts. This kind of posting—trolling—is an embrace of meaninglessness
itself—of the absurd. It’s a rejection of truth and of caring about truth. It’s
a repudiation of excellence and caring about excellence—because truth and
excellence exist only as measured against the objective, external standards
that absurdism says we can’t know.
Trump’s post is but a small, insignificant example of
absurdist humor. A more consequential example is portrayed in the harrowing
Netflix documentary Train Wreck: Storm Area 51. A social media post
calling on viewers to storm a classified military base drew millions of viewers
and posed a risk to national security that the government took very seriously.
But it turned out to be “just a joke,” a shitpost that ran so far amok that it
eventually involved the U.S. military and cost taxpayers $11 million in the government’s attempt to
protect the base from a what appeared to be a credible threat.An article at the
Berkeley Political Review explains this phenomenon
of absurdist humor this way:
Endless shitposting and the
“brain rot aesthetic” are Camusian revolts, embracing chaotic, meaningless
content to cope with an overwhelming reality. Faced with existential threats,
absurdist humor becomes a way to navigate the void.
But it’s not just fun and games. The same article further
explains that as a deliberate “rejection of traditional political messaging,”
such posts are inherently political. They express the choice “to engage in
pointless content rather than traditional political discourse” and reflect “a
deep skepticism of politics as a means of change.”
Absurdity, then, takes the place of argument or
persuasion.
The lulz garner clicks, the guffaws build camaraderie, and the
manufactured fraternity shores up a faux sense of shared courage against the
disorientation created by a world of rapid change. Rather than rage against the
machine that produces underemployment, overeducation, lifetime debt, and
addiction to porn, one can mock. It is an existential choice to laugh in the
absence of the transcendent: civility, mutual respect, human dignity, and even
the ultimate source of these—a holy God.
Proverbs 26:18-19 warns, “Like a maniac shooting flaming
arrows of death is one who deceives their neighbor and says,
‘I was only joking!’” Troublingly, some experts observe that online trolling and similar
behaviors are correlated with “what psychologists call the Dark Tetrad: sadism,
psychopathy, narcissism, and Machiavellianism.” Indeed, research by the Centre for Research and Evidence on Security Threats has
linked “extremist content under the guise of edgy, rebellious humor”
along with its “faux sense of rebellion,” to real-life racism, antisemitism,
xenophobia, and mass violence. These things are no joke.
What made it so challenging to teach my evangelical
undergraduates about absurdism all those years ago is the fact that then—if not
now—absurdism appeared to be philosophy far removed from Christian engagement
with the world, including politics. Evangelicals were (or claimed to be) the
defenders of “truth-with-a-capital-T,” the ones holding back the tide of
creeping relativism, and apologists for the ultimate meaning to be found beyond
and outside of ourselves. That is no longer the case—even if it ever really was.
Life indeed does imitate art.
Now absurdism is everywhere, every day, not merely
present but celebrated, embraced, and even helping to direct our national political landscape.
Of course, human existence offers many absurdities. But
absurdism as a worldview or philosophy of life contradicts core Christian
understandings. The preacher in Ecclesiastes confronts the seeming vanity of
life and the limits of human endeavors, but ultimately recognizes that God has
a purpose for our existence even if we cannot always see it for ourselves. The
book begins with the exclamation,
“Meaningless! Meaningless!”
says
the Teacher.
“Utterly meaningless!
Everything is meaningless.”
Yet, it concludes with the essential meaning of human life:
Fear God and keep his
commandments,
for
this is the duty of all mankind.
For God will bring every deed into judgment,
including every hidden thing,
whether
it is good or evil.
Likewise, after much suffering and argument, Job finally
understands that the meaning of our lives is “too wonderful to know” and is found only in God.
We may not always be able to see the meaning in
everything. Camus was right about that. But Christians believe that we can know
the ultimate source and end of all meaning—the Creator who became human and
entered into this life to experience human existence with us. We can know that
truth, goodness, and beauty are worthy of being pursued and cultivated because
they reflect the nature and character of God as well as the design for the
human beings made in his image. We can know, too, that even the most mundane
and futile-seeming tasks, when done to serve our neighbor and to glorify God,
matter both now and for eternity.
When the absurdist tears down, we can build up.
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