There is a particular loneliness that comes with feeling out of place in the world. You look around and everyone else seems to be operating from a script you never received. They appear certain, purposeful, at home in their lives. And you wonder what is wrong with you that the whole arrangement feels so strange.

Camus, writing in The Rebel, offers a correction. Nothing is wrong with you. That strangeness you feel is not a personal defect. It is the human condition, experienced by every person who has ever paused long enough to notice the gap between what we want from existence and what existence provides. The distance between ourselves and the universe is not yours alone to carry. It belongs to all of us.

This realization changes something. The absurd, experienced in isolation, can feel crushing. But recognized as a shared condition, it becomes a bond. The stranger sitting across from you on the train is also a stranger in the universe. The colleague making small talk is also navigating a world that offers no final answers.

You are not uniquely lost. You are ordinarily lost, in the company of everyone who has ever lived. And in that company, there is something that feels remarkably like belonging.