Absurdism vs Existentialism: Is Absurdism Just Existentialism With Good Vibes?

Last updated: November 3, 2026

Absurdism, existentialism and nihilism all start from the same problem, a world that offers no built-in meaning, and give three different answers. Nihilism concludes that nothing has meaning or value. Existentialism, in Jean-Paul Sartre’s version, holds that because existence precedes essence, we create meaning through our choices. Absurdism, Albert Camus’s position in The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), holds that the conflict between our demand for meaning and the world’s silence cannot be resolved, only lived with lucidly, and it rejects both despair and any leap of faith. Camus insisted the difference was real: in an interview in Les Nouvelles littéraires on 15 November 1945 he said plainly that he was not an existentialist, as Philosophy Now documents.

Picture a sleepover gone wrong. A grumpy cartoon squid lies awake in bed, eyes wide open, labelled “Existentialists”. Through the round porthole window he can see his relentlessly cheerful neighbour outside, labelled “Albert Camus”, clearly having the time of his life at an hour meant for staring at the ceiling. Both face the same night, and only one of them has decided to enjoy it.

Three Answers to the Same Silence

The quickest way to tell the three apart is to ask each one what to do once you notice that the universe is not going to tell you what your life is for.

The table simplifies, as tables do. Existentialism is a family, not a party line: the word was only coined by Gabriel Marcel in 1943, and according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy only Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir explicitly took the label. Its family tree reaches back to Søren Kierkegaard, who answered the silence with faith. Nihilism, likewise, is more often a diagnosis than a programme: in notes published after his death, Nietzsche called his forecast of it “the history of the next two centuries”, a crisis he wanted to overcome, not a creed he recommended. Absurdism sits between them. It agrees with the nihilist that no meaning is given, and with the existentialist that you still have to live, but it refuses to let either side close the gap. For the ways the internet bends this, see our post on common misconceptions about absurdism.

“I Am Not an Existentialist”

Camus rejected the label more than once, and he had reasons beyond irritation at being filed next to Sartre.

The timing tells a story. Sartre gave his lecture Existentialism Is a Humanism at the Club Maintenant in Paris on 29 October 1945, a talk that went “internationally viral”, as Skye C. Cleary recounts in Aeon. Seventeen days later, in the Nouvelles littéraires interview, Camus said he and Sartre were always surprised to see their names linked, and that The Myth of Sisyphus had been written against the so-called existentialist philosophers, according to the Philosophy Now account. He also called himself an artist rather than a philosopher, because he thought “according to words and not according to ideas”, a line the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes also turns up in his notebooks.

Their accounts of the absurd differ at the root. For Sartre, absurdity is a basic feature of existence itself. For Camus, the SEP explains, it lives in the relationship between human beings and the world: neither we alone nor the world alone is absurd, only the encounter. Camus also rejected Sartre’s founding formula. As the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes, he defended a shared human nature against the claim that existence precedes essence. So is absurdism a form of existentialism? By Camus’s own account, no: a neighbour, a critic and sometimes a friend, but not a member.

Why Textbooks Still File Camus Under Existentialism

If Camus rejected the label so firmly, why does almost every introduction to existentialism include him? Part of the answer is history. In 1956 the philosopher Walter Kaufmann published Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, an anthology that shaped how English-speaking students met the movement for decades, and it included a selection from Camus alongside Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Sartre. Publishers, critics and journalists had already grouped the Paris writers of the 1940s together, and the grouping stuck long after its members had stopped speaking to one another.

The other part of the answer is philosophical. Existentialism has never been a school with a membership list. It is better described by family resemblance: a focus on the concrete individual rather than human nature in general, on freedom and responsibility, on anxiety, absurdity and death, and on the question of how to live authentically without inherited answers. Camus shares most of these concerns. Sartre himself recognised the kinship early, in his long review of The Stranger in 1943, where he read the novel through Camus’s idea of the absurd.

Camus also had his own ancestors in that family. He admired Dostoevsky above almost any other writer, devoted a chapter of The Myth of Sisyphus to the character Kirilov in Demons, and late in his life adapted the novel for the stage in Paris in 1959. Kierkegaard, whom he criticised, still set many of the questions he answered. Being in the family, in other words, is not the same as agreeing with it, and Camus spent much of his career arguing with relatives.

So the honest answer to the question many readers bring to this page, is absurdism a type of existentialism, is: it depends on whether you sort by themes or by conclusions. By themes, absurdism belongs to the existentialist family. By conclusions, it is the family member who refuses the inheritance. Camus accepted the starting point and rejected the step that makes Sartre’s existentialism hopeful, the claim that we can create meaning that fully answers the absurd.

Camus Calls the Leap “Philosophical Suicide”

The sharpest difference is how Camus treats the existentialists who found a way out. He accused them of escaping the problem rather than answering it.

The Myth of Sisyphus opens with its famous provocation: there is only one really serious philosophical question, and that is suicide. Camus’s answer to physical suicide is no, because it settles the absurd by abolishing one side of it, the person. But he finds a second, intellectual escape in thinkers such as Kierkegaard, Karl Jaspers and Lev Shestov, who confront the absurd and then leap to God or transcendence. Camus calls this move philosophical suicide. In the SEP’s summary, he charges that they “deify what crushes them” and find hope in what impoverishes them. Absurdism grew up in the same house as existentialism and then accused half the family of cheating.

Absurdism vs Nihilism: Camus Started Where Nihilism Ends

Camus took nihilism as the problem of his era and spent his career looking for a way past it that did not require a God or a final meaning.

“Absurdist nihilism”, a phrase that turns up a lot online, is close to a contradiction in Camus’s terms. If nothing mattered at all, there would be no absurd, because the absurd requires that our demand for meaning matters to us, that it hurts when the world does not answer. The IEP puts it plainly: Camus goes beyond nihilism by treating existence in the world as valuable in itself. In The Rebel (1951) he went further and argued that revolt reveals a shared value: when I refuse to accept injustice, I affirm something common to all humans. The SEP quotes his reworking of Descartes: “I revolt, therefore we are”.

For how Camus answered Nietzsche’s two nihilisms, the weary one and the destructive one, see the section on Stockholm syndrome in our guide What Is Absurdism?

The same book attacks the revolutionary ideologies that, in Camus’s view, used history to justify murder, and that critique ended his friendship with Sartre. In May 1952 Francis Jeanson savaged The Rebel in Sartre’s journal Les Temps modernes, and in August the journal printed Camus’s furious letter and Sartre’s reply, a public break over communism and the Soviet camps, as Eureka Street recounts and Ronald Aronson’s book Camus and Sartre (2004) tells in full. Absurdism came with a politics, and the politics cost Camus his best-known friend.

The Same Monday, Two Answers: Absurdism and Existentialism in Practice

The difference becomes clearer with an ordinary case. Imagine someone in a job that pays the rent and means nothing to them, getting up on a grey Monday and wondering what the point is. Camus himself described this moment in The Myth of Sisyphus: rising, streetcar, four hours in the office or factory, meal, streetcar, four hours of work, meal, sleep, and one day the question why.

Kierkegaard, a century earlier, would have given a third and older answer. For him the despair hidden in such a life was a sign that the self had not yet related itself to God, and the way out was not a better job or a braver attitude but the leap of faith. It is precisely this move that Camus called philosophical suicide: escaping the absurd by appealing to something that, by definition, reason cannot see. Sartre rejected the leap too, but replaced God with human commitment. Camus rejected both replacements, and that is the whole difference in one sentence.

Sartre’s answer would focus on choice and responsibility. You are not a waiter, a clerk or an accountant in the way a table is a table; telling yourself that you have no choice is bad faith. You can quit, retrain, organise, or stay, but whatever you do, you are choosing it, and through your choices you are defining what a human being should be. The way out of meaninglessness is commitment: a project that gives your days a direction you have chosen.

Camus’s answer is less ambitious and, some readers find, more honest. You may change jobs, and you should fight injustice where you meet it, but no project will make the question why go away for good. The task is to keep the question open without despair and without false comfort, to live lucidly, to revolt against what can be changed, and to take full pleasure in what life offers: the sun on the walk to work, a game of football, a conversation. Sartre asks you to make your life meaningful. Camus asks you to live it fully even if it is not.

Simone de Beauvoir, who knew both men well, would have added a third voice. In The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947) she argued that freedom is never only my own business: to will oneself free is also to will others free. On her view the person in the dead-end job is not just choosing a private project or a private attitude. Their situation is shaped by other people’s freedom and unfreedom, and an honest response has to include them. In that respect Beauvoir and the Camus of The Rebel are closer than either was to the early Sartre.

One Must Imagine Sisyphus Happy

The last line of The Myth of Sisyphus is the closest thing absurdism has to good vibes, and it is less cheerful than it sounds.

Sisyphus, condemned by the gods to push a rock up a hill forever, is Camus’s image of the absurd hero. The task has no end and no meaning beyond itself. Camus imagines him walking back down the slope, fully aware of his situation, and concludes that this lucidity is his victory: “One must imagine Sisyphus happy”. The SEP reads it as a call to live with clear-eyed, defiant awareness of limits, not as a claim that the problem has gone away. Whatever happiness Camus offers comes from lucidity, the pleasure of not lying to yourself, and has little to do with optimism. We go into the line, and whether it holds up, in One Must Imagine Sisyphus Happy: What Camus Meant.

Positive Absurdism and Optimistic Nihilism: The Internet’s Remixes

Online, the debate has produced its own versions. Optimistic nihilism became popular after a 2017 video of that name by the animation channel Kurzgesagt, which argued that if the universe has no built-in meaning, then nothing we do can ultimately go wrong, so we are free to enjoy life and make it as good as possible. Positive absurdism, a term used mostly in online discussions rather than academic philosophy, presents Camus as a source of cheerful defiance: the universe is absurd, so laugh and carry on.

Both remixes keep something real and drop something important. Optimistic nihilism keeps the freedom that comes with the absence of cosmic rules, but it often slides from “nothing is given” to “nothing matters”, which is exactly the inference Camus spent The Rebel arguing against. Positive absurdism captures the famous ending of The Myth of Sisyphus, but it tends to forget that Camus never called the absurd good news. His Sisyphus is happy in revolt, not in denial, and the rock is still heavy.

It is worth reading the famous last page itself, which is less like a motivational poster than its memes suggest. Camus writes that the struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart, and only then that one must imagine Sisyphus happy. The happiness he describes is not relief. It is the clear-eyed pride of someone who knows the boulder will roll down again and walks back to it anyway, which is why our guide to One Must Imagine Sisyphus Happy spends so much time on the walk down the mountain.

What these versions show is that people want a philosophy that makes meaninglessness bearable. Camus would have understood. He would just have insisted that the smile comes after looking at the problem squarely, not instead of it.

Sunlight, Football and No Appeal

Is absurdism just existentialism with good vibes? Partly. The meme is right that Camus’s tone is warmer, more sensual and more at home in the world than Sartre’s, and wrong if “good vibes” means absurdism comforts you.

Camus kept goal for the junior team of Racing Universitaire d’Alger until tuberculosis ended it in 1930, according to the IEP, and he loved sunlight and the Mediterranean; it shows in the prose. The Stranger ends with its narrator opening himself to la tendre indifférence du monde, the tender (or, in older translations, benign) indifference of the world. Sartre’s Antoine Roquentin, by contrast, meets the bare contingency of existence in Nausea (1938) with something close to seasickness. In that sense the squid in bed and the neighbour outside capture a real difference in temperament. Absurdism, though, promises less than existentialism does. Sartre tells you that you can create meaning and must take responsibility for it. Camus tells you the question will stay unanswered and that you should live fully anyway, without appeal.

For the boulder itself, read One Must Imagine Sisyphus Happy: What Camus Meant.

Nihilism, Existentialism or Absurdism? Which Answer Fits You

It may help to put the three positions side by side one last time. Nihilism looks at the empty sky and concludes that values have no foundation, and in its strong forms that nothing is worth anything. Existentialism looks at the same sky and says that, precisely because nothing is given, we must create our values through what we choose and do. Absurdism looks at it and says that the longing for meaning and the silence of the world will never be reconciled, and that the dignity of human life lies in living with that tension instead of resolving it with a story.

Which answer fits you is not a matter of temperament alone. It depends on what you think follows from the absence of a given meaning, and on whether you believe that the meanings we create can carry the weight we put on them. For the full portrait of each position, read our guides What Is Existentialism?, What Is Nihilism? and What Is Absurdism?, and decide for yourself which of the three you would want to argue with at three in the morning.

A fourth voice deserves a hearing before you decide. In 1971 the American philosopher Thomas Nagel published a short paper called “The Absurd”, in which he argued that our sense of absurdity does not come from the universe at all. It comes from our ability to step back from our own lives and see them from outside, as one small life among billions, while we still have to live them from inside with full seriousness. Nagel thought Camus’s heroic defiance made too much of this. If absurdity is just a by-product of being creatures who can take that outside view, the fitting response is not scorn or revolt but a little irony. Camus might have answered that irony is easy for a professor and harder in occupied Paris, which is perhaps the best argument for reading both.

Whichever answer you choose, all three agree on one thing that the memes usually miss: the question deserves to be taken seriously, there is no shame in asking it, and the worst answer is the one you adopt without ever having asked.