> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://absurdia.xyz/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # We're all just neighbors living in Absurdia. - URL: https://absurdia.xyz/howdy-neighbor/ - Published: 2026-08-06T04:45:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-08-28T15:36:16.000Z - Description: Look around. Really look around. You can find the absurd literally everywhere. - Author: Mack Simpson - Tags: Absurdia With the obligatory first and second posts out of the way— what amounts to my welcome message [("It's only logical in its absurdity.")](https://absurdia.xyz/obligatory-welcome/), and the absurd revelation about my choice of Ghost as my writing platform [("A bit of a backstory.")](https://absurdia.xyz/a-bit-of-backstory/)— it's probably time to talk about, you know, the elephant in the room: *Absurdia*. Look around. Really look around. You can find the absurd literally everywhere. I believe *we're soaking in it*, to pull a line from my industry. All of us. Soaking in it, living there. A giant, worldwide suburbia filled with crazy neighbors, hypocritical religious zealots, puffed-up egos ready to pop at the smallest pinprick (or, worse, ignoring the pinprick and gaslighting others into believing they didn't hear a *pop!).* And, yes, even the occasional dog dressed up like Joan Rivers. They're living in *Absurdia*, too. You've probably seen them at the dog park. But where is *Absurdia* located on the map? The mental map, that is, not the physical one (since it's, well, *everyfuckingwhere*). What's *absurd*? [Albert Camus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert%5FCamus?ref=absurdia.xyz) thought life was absurd. Not, you know, "haha" absurd, but *structurally* absurd. He defined absurdity as a mismatch: humans crave meaning, purpose, a reason things happen, and the universe answers with total silence. We ask "why?" and the cosmos shrugs. That gap between our hunger for sense and the world's indifference is, for Camus, the absurd. His famous fix wasn't suicide (too easy, he said) or blind faith (also too easy, just dressed up nicer). It was defiance: keep pushing the boulder like [*Sisyphus*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sisyphus?ref=absurdia.xyz), fully aware it'll roll back down, and find a kind of rebellious joy in the pushing itself (which is also [a concept in Stoicism](https://dailystoic.com/amor-fati-love-of-fate/?ref=absurdia.xyz) known as "*amor fati*," love of fate). "One must imagine Sisyphus happy," Camus wrote, which is either the most inspiring sentence in philosophy or the setup to a very, very dark joke, depending on your mood that day. I'm a Gen-Xer, so I tend toward the dark on most days (yeah, generalizations). But picture any major tech company's quarterly earnings call. Executives explain, with *total* confidence, why *this* quarter's numbers matter *enormously*, and six months later nobody remembers a word of it. Worse, the stock chart looks like a toddler drew it. Badly. Camus would say: yes, exactly, and yet everyone shows up to next quarter's call anyway, wearing suits, and with presentation slides tucked under their arms. That's absurdism in a conference room. They keep their chins up and soldier on, over and over again. Sisyphi all, pushing the rock. British Tommies during *The Great War* had a song they'd sing as they waited in the muddy trenches, anticipating the whistle that would send them scrambling up and over its walls and toward what was almost certain death at the hands of a 20th Century war being fought with 19th Century tactics they were powerless to do anything about. It was sung to the tune of *Auld Lang Syne*. Same thing. Absurd. Everything about it, absurd. [Joel Feinberg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joel%5FFeinberg?ref=absurdia.xyz) comes at absurdity from a very different angle, one with less existential dread, and with a more careful, lawyerly cross-examination of the concept. In "[Absurd Self-Fulfillment](https://reasonandmeaning.com/2015/11/26/summary-of-joel-feinbergs-absurd-self-fulfillment/?ref=absurdia.xyz)," he asks: when we call a whole life "absurd," what are we *actually* claiming? He distinguishes *local absurdity* (a single ridiculous moment, like tripping at your own wedding, or the Joan Rivers poodle you saw at the dog park) from *cosmic absurdity* (Camus's big claim about existence itself). Feinberg is skeptical that the "cosmic" version even makes coherent sense as a claim, particularly since you'd need a reference point somewhere *outside the universe* to judge the universe as being pointless, and we don't have one of those (yet). Feinberg was more interested in something practical: how a person builds a meaningful, self-fulfilled life using their own values, talents, and choices, absurd cosmic backdrop or not. Or maybe despite it. Where Camus treats the absurd as the fundamental fact you must heroically confront, Feinberg treats "meaning" as something built locally and successfully, all the time, by ordinary people doing ordinary things... with occasional absurd moments sprinkled in (but not as the whole verdict on existence, itself). Consider climate diplomats. Every year, another summit, another round of pledges, another set of headlines about targets quietly missed. And the world gets hotter while the wheels just keep on perpetually spinning. A committed Camus reader watches this and sees the Sisyphus story on a planetary scale. The futility is the point, and the delegates who keep showing up are, in their own way, heroic. Feinberg would push back gently: call it absurd if you like in the small, ironic sense (the gap between promise and outcome is genuinely comic-tragic), but don't let that word smuggle in a verdict on whether any individual delegate's career, marriage, or life's work is meaningless. Those get judged by much more local, human standards: did they act with integrity, build things they valued, fulfill capacities they cared about, and not by whether or not the universe applauds. (Though we all certainly would if they solved the problem of 120° summers and everything else that comes with them.) Put the two side by side and you get a nice division of labor, with Camus supplying the vertigo-inducing 30,000 foot view from above, and Feinberg supplying the practical accounting that comes from living a life with boots on the ground. One tells you the boulder never stays at the top. The other reminds you that "meaningful" was never really about the boulder's final resting place to begin with. I'm here to tell you it's all fodder for *Absurdia*, and I'll see you at the dog park. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2e/f4/2ef499d4-e94b-4b36-987c-da9be1bf2b17/content/images/2026/08/M-smallsig-3.png)