You could eat the finest meal in the world while scrolling through your phone and taste nothing. You could walk through a forest and miss every bird, every shifting pattern of light, every scent of pine and earth. The experience happens, but without your conscious presence, it holds no value for you. It might as well not have occurred.

Camus makes a radical claim here: consciousness is not just one value among many, but the very foundation that makes all other values possible. Love, beauty, achievement, pleasure, meaning itself… none of these can exist for you without your awareness of them. A life lived entirely on autopilot, even a comfortable one, is a life without worth. Not because such a life is morally wrong, but because there is no one truly present to receive its gifts.

This is both a sobering and liberating insight. Sobering, because it reveals how much of our lives we may have already sleepwalked through. Liberating, because it tells us that the path to a richer life does not require changing our circumstances but changing our attention. The first step toward any meaningful existence is simply this: wake up to the life you are already living.