The absurdist's playground

(Inspired by a conversation with my good friend.)

The absurdists are saying something very simple. They are saying: life is not an obstacle course. It’s a playground.

What makes a playground different from an obstacle course?

• There’s no predetermined or “right” path.
• It doesn’t lead anywhere else.
• There are no judges or prizes.
• There might be rules to break, but you can’t be disqualified.
• You can’t “win.”
• You won’t be remembered for exceptional performance.
• Your performance won’t be measured at all, at least not from the outside.

What you see on the playground is all there is, and all you get out of it is the time you spend there. Is this depressing? Go ask a child if a playground is depressing.

Children know what to do at a playground. They don’t need to be instructed. They don’t need to be rewarded. They don’t need cosmic legends and mystic insights to tell them what to do. Can you imagine saying to a child, The teeter-totter is the most meaningful piece of equipment, so be sure to spend most of your time on it? You would ruin their fun. Or imagine saying, The tunnel slide is a pernicious evil. Tommy broke his leg on it last year, and that’s what happens to children who play on the tunnel slide. Our best hope is that the child would laugh and ignore you. As soon as you assign meaning or transcendence or morality to playground equipment, you spoil the playground’s best use. At worst, you create a generation of children who repress their true selves in order to act out silly rituals.

It’s better to let them play.

This is the absurdist’s approach to life. Let the playground equipment represent careers or hobbies or friends or partners or all of these at once. The teeter-totter doesn’t “mean” anything. There’s no lasting reward for playing on it. It’s not better or worse than any other playground activity. You can’t set up a better death for yourself by working hard on the teeter-totter while you live. But you can go up and down on it! And if you find someone to sit on the other side, you can make up a game to see how fast you can go up and down. The game is pointless—no one denies its pointlessness—but in the moment, it fills you with a sense of purpose, and this is a good enough reason to do it. With eyes wide open, this sense of purpose satisfies a need in the depths of the human mind. It soothes the “feeling of cosmic panic” spoken of by Zapffe. It gives power and direction to life.

The playground metaphor has more to give, so humor me a moment longer.

Almost the first thing a child does at the playground is make up games with their friends, who may well be strangers. Pay attention: they devise the games so as to make playtime more difficult. They invent rules as they go along and assign each other roles to play. They find challenges, especially impossible challenges, irresistible. They want to balance on the fulcrum of the teeter-totter. They want to climb up the slide, even though it’s easy to go down. They want to cross the monkey bars, never mind that they don’t have the strength to move from one bar to the next. They press themselves into harder and more precarious activities until they fall and hurt themselves. Difficulty and failure are part of the allure, so we can’t mistake them for hedonists.

A child at the playground has no end in mind, but spends every moment in a state of purposefulness and connection. They are doing with little concern for what will happen after they go home. And they are happy.

This type of play isn’t existentialism: if you ask a child why they’re going up the slide, they’re unlikely to invoke the meaning of life. Nor is it entirely nihilism, because while the child understands that the playground isn’t a contest between good and evil or a search for god, they still find purpose by superimposing contests and searches on it.

No, it’s proper absurdism. They’re enacting purpose without meaning. They are rebelling against the playground’s deadness and inertness, its lack of transcendence, by working very hard at self-imposed tasks. You can accuse them of wasting their time, but they don’t care.

If absurdism is such a simple, childlike proposition, why are many adults allergic to it?

The first problem is the scent of nihilism. The concept of a godless, meaningless universe is wrongly seen as demotivating. Some imagine the nihilist a dreary figure, laying on a park bench and refusing to play. But meaning doesn’t carry you down the slide; gravity does. And god doesn’t make the swings go back and forth; you can do that all by yourself. Nihilism doesn’t end with the proposition that everything is, ultimately, empty. It begins with it. And there are many places a nihilist can go, many things they can do, without denying that emptiness. A thing may be no more than a collection of molecules, and a person no more than an automaton, but that doesn’t make it illegal to care about them.

Absurdism takes this further by laying the foundation for our life’s work. The nihilist knows they can do whatever they wish, but the absurdist knows they must do something. The value of an absurdist’s life is in their experiences, and the satisfaction of it is in striving to defeat the void itself, creating the experience of meaning where there is none. They’re the furthest thing from demotivated. They have a source of motivation that can never run dry.

The second problem is the urgency of life’s demands. How can I call life a playground when so many are forced to huddle in one corner of it, doing unpleasant work so they can afford rent and food? There’s no denying the unjustness of the world. Absurdism, though, is not a self-help book or a motivational speaker. It isn’t absurdism’s job to make the world seem conquerable. Even so, an absurdist can frame the situation better than their peers. An existentialist might say, “you can find joy and meaning, even in the darkest of nights,” and a nihilist might say, “a life of abject labor is no better or worse than any other.” But the absurdist says, “fight the impossible.” Of course, the other philosophies are flexible to a point, and can offer more than I’ve portrayed, but absurdism is not even capable of passivity. Absurdism, at its core, is about intense and intentional conflict. Instead of bland acceptance, it offers philosophical weaponry. And I say it’s right to do so. The oppressed don’t need condescending platitudes. They need cannons.

The third and last problem is the appeal of zealotry. I define zealotry as the belief that a particular end justifies any and all means. In this form, it’s one of the most destructive and contagious social ills in the world. People who are naturally kind can be compelled to incredible evil by the belief that “the greater good”—whether a god, a king, a political ideal, or a material pursuit—demands it. And what they receive in exchange is a promise that they are in tune with life’s true meaning, which will either be explained to them at a later date or has already been explained in fictional terms. People are drawn to zealotry because it makes life seem simple by writing off its most fundamental questions. A vegan rarely puzzles over too many options at a restaurant, and a zealot rarely wonders if murder is justified.

A zealot’s beliefs always demand, or retain the right to demand, the extermination of all structures and concepts that do or might oppose them. This is true for all beliefs, even pacifism. The belief itself will not limit the zealot. The zealot must limit the belief. The relationship between them is not equitable.

Absurdism can immunize us against zealotry, if we let it. It excludes the concept of any “greater good” that lacks material facts, availability to the senses, or self-evidence. It doesn’t necessarily exclude a practice of spirituality or loyalty, insofar as the practice has inherent value, but it prevents us from sacrificing ourselves and others on the invisible altar of “someday.” It restricts us to only the most honest calculations of merit, uncorrupted by arbitrary and unaccountably massive variables. Nihilism can do this too, but it can’t address the root of the problem, which resides in human nature. Absurdism can: it satisfies the rebel in us.

Thus, when our peers treat the playground like an obstacle course—one that must be won at all costs—we have the tools to fight back. We can show satisfaction and determination equal to theirs. We can strategize with a fair mind, forcing them to defend what is not worth defending. We can teach their followers to ask questions they can’t answer. If necessary, we can go up against insurmountable odds—we’re accustomed to it.

In the end, absurdism isn’t asking something that requires extraordinary intelligence or depth. It’s only asking us to play, the way we’ve done since we were children.