When we truly grasp the absurd, we stand at a crossroads. We have asked the universe for meaning and received only silence. We have demanded answers and found none waiting. What then?

Camus spent years wrestling with this question and arrived at a counterintuitive answer. The proper response to meaninglessness is not to end the confrontation but to continue it. To stay present. To keep asking, even knowing no answer will come.

This is not about hope in the conventional sense. Camus is not promising that things will improve or that meaning will eventually reveal itself. He is saying something more radical: the encounter itself, the persistence in questioning, is where we discover our humanity.

Think of how often we want to escape when life feels pointless. We reach for distractions, we check out emotionally, we sleepwalk through our days. These are all small surrenders. Camus asks us instead to remain fully awake in the face of silence. Not because it feels good, but because this wakefulness is the only honest response we can give. In that persistence, we affirm our own existence.