It is à la mode these days to proclaim the meaninglessness of life and the pointlessness of everything. Pervading our memes, media and overall cultural scene, the figure of the cigarette-smoking, truth-spewing nihilist seemingly enjoys great sex appeal in our “modern” age. French-Algerian absurdist philosopher Albert Camus seems the epitome of this phenomenon. Wrapped in his iconic trench coat, cigarette in mouth, Camus appears to have come straight out of Jean-Luc Goddard’s crazed French New Wave cinema. Even his life — from revolting against injustice through his resistance against Nazi occupation to militant journalism and Nobel Prize winning literature, only to suddenly end in a car accident — seems like the final brush stroke on his absurdist project. But Camus himself rejected nihilism: in his philosophy of the absurd, he asserted that the search for meaning itself was meaningful.

And yet, Camus’s absurdism, a philosophy that allows for meaning in life, is probably the closest thing we can find to a nihilistic project; that is, the idea that life has no meaning. This raises the question: can there be such a thing as a truly nihilistic project? After all, a project entails a purpose, it creates meaning. It seems we have found ourselves a thorny paradox: proclaiming the meaningless of life already imbues it with meaning.

To resolve this apparent paradox, we first need to answer the following question: what do we mean when we talk about meaning? In French, the word for meaning, “sens”, also means direction. “Sens” captures a sense of impetus, of movement towards something. “Sens” thus captures an intuitive conception of meaning as a sense of purpose, regardless of whether this purpose is fulfilled. In the words of Camus himself, “the literal meaning of life is whatever you’re doing that prevents you from killing yourself.” Be it well thought out or unexamined, one’s purpose in life imbues it with meaning.

Another less common way to comprehend meaning could be literary or aesthetic: something has meaning if it can be weaved into a story. Here, we come back to our paradox. Ingrained in all proclamations of meaninglessness is a purpose — hopeless perhaps but a purpose nonetheless. When Camus speaks of the absurd — “the divorce between our aspiration to meaning and the universe’s silence” — he is already creating a narrative; already the image of the absurdist hero pops into our minds; already the universe is personified. The search for meaning has become a trope. The struggles, setbacks and triumphs it entails are similar to those of any other quest. Just like with any other search, those vicissitudes carry meaning. As such, the very existence of nihilist literature would disprove its claims.

Still, one might deem this meaning an illusion and declare that we are merely deluding ourselves. To examine the reasons one might have for holding this position, we must investigate the origins of the absurd. Whence cometh the absurd? Two origins are regularly presented, both tied to the Scientific Revolution. First, the loss of our special status in the universe. This loss is said to follow from what Freud described as “great outrages upon [humanity’s] naive self-love.”

There have been great blows to our narcissism delivered by a number of scientific discoveries. Copernicus’ heliocentrism displaced Earth and therefore humanity from the center of the universe and Darwin’s theory of evolution toppled us from our pedestal as special creations superior to other forms of life. A second origin of this lack of meaning in our lives is our loss of agency. This loss follows from advancements in the biological, neurological and psychological fields. Indeed, by explaining our behavior in terms of chemicals and subconscious motives, these developments seemingly rid us of all agency. Meaning then appears to be completely artificial and one seems justified in denouncing it as fake.

However, this rejection of meaning’s actuality stems from our confusion of artificiality and fakeness, of construct and illusion. An infamous example of this conflation occurs often in discussions of social constructs, notably of gender. Disingenuous detractors claim that the social construction of gender means that gender doesn’t exist, a strawman which then allows them to smugly dismiss it, with statements such as: “if gender isn’t real, how can someone identify as one or the other?” But the fact of the matter is that the constructed nature of something doesn't imply its inexistence; it just means that this something — in our example, gender — isn’t set in stone, but rather mutable. Money is a construct, as its value is socially mandated, but that doesn’t stop people from hoarding it. To employ an easy analogy: if I show someone a house I built, they wouldn’t deny its existence. Thus, the artificiality of meaning doesn’t mean it’s fake.

Say now that I point at the house again and explain all the steps I took in constructing it, where all the bricks came from and how they all fit together. Would that take anything away from its worth? Most certainly not, as explaining a process does not negate it. Beethoven’s symphonies may be mere acoustic waves, but to our ears, they are moving music; love may only be a set of chemical reactions, but to a lover, it is an exhilarating embrace; and revolution might just be a displaced rebellion against one’s father, the workings of unconscious drives, but to a person, it is a heroic stand that might inspire millions of others. The fact that meaning wasn’t God-given, that it didn’t stem from our place in the cosmos, that it can be explained by chemical reactions — in sum, that it is artificial — doesn’t mean that it is fake. We would be vain creatures indeed if we demanded to be at the center of the universe to have meaning in our lives.