Camus is making two claims that look like they cancel each other out but do not. The world has no ultimate meaning. And yet something in it does have meaning. That something is the human being, and the reason is the insistence.

Notice the precision. He is not saying that humans are meaningful because we are clever, or because we love, or because we suffer. He is saying we are meaningful because we will not stop demanding meaning from a world that does not provide it. The insistence is the thing. The asking, even unanswered, is the answer.

This reframes a lot of what looks like failure or pretension. The five-year-old asking why for the hundredth time. The grieving parent who refuses to accept that this happened for no reason. The old man still trying to articulate what his life was for. From the outside, these can look like people who have not faced facts. From Camus’s angle, they are doing the only thing that makes a human a human. They are insisting.

Revolt, in its largest sense, is this insistence carried into a life. You face a world that owes you nothing and offers no explanation. You go on demanding that something here make sense. You build, refuse, love, work, ask again. You are not finding meaning that was already there. You are creating it through the pure act of asking. This is the deepest reason for revolt and the strongest reason to continue.