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

Last updated: October 20, 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.

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”.

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.

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.

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.