Life, Death, and Not-Giving-a-F**k
Indifference is a loaded word. It has a negative connotation, one that many people instinctively respond to with push-back. And herein lies Camus’s genius: He managed to show us another side to indifference by making us realize that, actually, indifference is the only thing that allows us to function in a world we don’t fully understand. Only by turning our back to some aspects of this reality do we get the chance to really face the other aspects — the freer, the more honest ones.
Growing up, I used to feel a quiet kind of shame. Not just because I had reasoned my way out of not giving a fuck about dying but also because I didn’t give a fuck about most of the day to day things that seemed to absorb the world around me, like who to vote for and what societal game to play. As a result, the questions kept coming up: Does it mean that I don’t care about anything? Am I a sociopath? The fact that I say I value kindness and beauty and all of the other soft and warm things, are those lies?
More than anything else in the novel, though, it is the protagonist’s indifference that makes it fascinating. It’s also what, I suspect, makes him relatable to the many people who have read the book (even though he is very unlike most of them), making the latter argument in Camus’s dichotomy more appealing than it sounds on paper. It’s the freedom of his indifference, the rebellion he expresses in the face of absurdity, that makes you feel like he is waking up a part of you that is in a deep, dreamless sleep, hoping to escape. This indifference reflects the larger indifference of the universe, and yet, a society built on an illusion will treat it as less true, less real.
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