In The Fall, Camus’s narrator Jean-Baptiste Clamence speaks from a bar in Amsterdam, confessing his life to a stranger. He is charming, self-aware, and deeply unsettled. This line lands like a confession inside a confession: when you have no higher authority to organize your time, no cosmic schedule to follow, the sheer accumulation of days becomes its own kind of burden.

Most people feel this without naming it. The Sunday evening dread that has nothing to do with Monday’s tasks. The strange emptiness after accomplishing a goal you thought would change everything. The hours that stretch when no one is expecting anything of you. These are not signs of depression or laziness. They are encounters with the absurd, moments when the absence of built-in meaning makes itself felt in your bones.

Clamence’s solution in the novel is to invent a role for himself, to become a “judge-penitent” who confesses in order to judge others. It is a brilliant and terrible evasion. Camus shows us the temptation clearly: when the weight becomes too much, we will reach for almost any structure, even a fraudulent one, rather than sit with the discomfort of genuine freedom.

The harder path is to feel the weight and carry it honestly.