Day 1 -- The Stranger

Mild Life of Contentment v. Driven but Narrow Focus

I think they can both work. It depends on the person, and how they view their life at the end of the day. There’s plenty of driven people out there who can reflect on their life and say that they are happy with what they’ve accomplished. Just as many people who can live a boring life and say they were glad to do it.

It depends on your idea of pleasure and passion is. Some people can play Fortnite for days and find themselves satisfied. Others find that fucking stupid. The value of life is in the eye of the beholder; it depends much more on if you can personally deal with the long-term status of your life by its end.

Getting a Chance to Reflect on Life

I would rather die without getting the chance. Reflection is too stressful. Dying immediately is like the power going out; you get upset at first and then realize its nothing. Of course, I use I because for some people it might be different. Others will need that bit of reflection to gain satisfaction. For others, that reflection will just make things worse.

I don’t think granting a person reflection is always going to be better than people who don’t have it. Some people go crazy on death row knowing that their death is coming soon. There is no reflection there; or perhaps too much.

Society Gives Purpose

A point brought up a lot in class was, if nothing really matters, why do we don’t we just give up, and stop all of our processes? Drop out of school, quit our job, and go live on a beach. Now, of course, we don’t do that. But, why that of course? I believe society is in play here. We assign value to school because we ought to go to school according to societal standards. We must keep our job because we ought to as jobs are assigned value in a community. Our entire system of goals and motivations is, for the most part, driven by society.

A little bit of biology plays in here, but not much. One might say that you must have a job in order to keep daily needs, but that’s not necessarily true. Both outdoor and urban survival is proven to be possible, so although society provides a much nicer cushion (hence why society came into prominence in the first place) it is not brutally required to sustain basic needs. Still, because of this cushion – and because of our natural aversion to the rougher path – biology has at least some role.

Values

Values are everything. Meursault saw that, and I suppose by extension Camus did too. If you do not have core values, you are nothing. If you are afraid of who you are, you are nothing. Meursault is the quintessential example of holding these core values to the full extent. As Camus beautifully put it, “[Meursault] was punished because he refused to play the game”. Sometimes to understand yourself you cannot play the game. Others will not understand, but you will. And that’s what’s important.

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