Most of us spend our lives running from what Camus asks us to sit with. We feel the gap between what we want from the world and what we get, and we rush to close it. We manufacture purpose through productivity apps and ten-year plans. We distract ourselves with noise. Anything to avoid the silence that started the question.

Camus proposes something counterintuitive: don’t close the gap. Live inside it. The absurd, he writes in The Myth of Sisyphus, is not a conclusion but a starting point, and it can only do its work if you refuse to look away.

This is harder than it sounds. Contemplation is not passive. It requires you to stand in the tension between your hunger for meaning and the universe’s refusal to provide it, without collapsing into either despair or false comfort. You do not get to numb yourself. You do not get to invent a convenient answer.

But something unexpected happens when you stay in that tension. Life does not become bleaker. It becomes more vivid. Colors sharpen when you stop filtering them through expectation. Conversations deepen when you stop needing them to prove something. The meal you eat, the walk you take, the work you do today all gain a strange weight precisely because nothing guarantees their significance.

Contemplation, for Camus, is not withdrawal from life. It is the most direct way of entering it.