short one here, just wanna write some stuff down

Putting pen to paper (or any isomorphism of such, as is the case here) is always the hardest part of writing things down. You have so many thoughts in your head that you feel like you need to scream out but when it comes to actually materializing them the mind pulls out a blank. Maybe that's a symptom of having feelings messily interwoven with fragmented thoughts, or maybe it's just a regular part of writing. Either way, talking about it helps warm you up.

Recently (like, a month ago at this point maybe? my sense of time is warped as hell) I finished reading The Stranger by Albert Camus, translated by Matthew Ward (as far as I'm aware, the canonical English translation). Being on the internet in 2026, I'm aware of the extensive praise surrounding Camus and his works, and how often they're mostly gleaned from people's discussion of it. I have this video in mind when speaking about this, and while to me it provides an accurate summary of Camus' beliefs, I feel that any secondhand interaction with his work (or most philosophy, for that matter) will always be clouded by the personal affects of whoever's perspective is being mixed in. Not that that's something to be avoided - that's a part of the growth of human knowledge - but there's merit to just sitting down and reading what gets regurgitated ad nauseum.

Absurdity and Post-Truth

The Stranger made me think about the agency that we have living day-to-day. While we have free will on paper, it never seems to actualize in a way that actually lets us change the course of our lives in a significant way (that is, in any direction that doesn't lead to more despair than our default state). We seem to drift unaware of the machines that set the current. These machines comprise many things: inertia, economics, physical sensation, neurochemistry, superego, etc., and through our dumb inaction they can create the absurd landscape which surrounds us. Meursault is made emotionally distant from his mother through economic and physical (distance) factors outside of his control, he encourages the immorality of his peers through no input of his own, he kills someone because of the stinging heat which boils his senses. We see these events from Meursault's internal experience, and thus find them to be absent of malice, in contrast to how he's viewed by the court. The point is, the choices that we are allowed to make that don't destroy us keep us on the same well-tread road, creating a sort of effective lack of free will that emerges from a running average of the decisions that our consciousness allows us to make.

That sort of reading applies more today than it did during Camus' time: where the systems we created for ourselves radiate suffering as a byproduct of existing in them. Chocolate is made through slave labor, driving to watch a movie contributes to the accelerated dying of our planet, you get the idea. This immorality has been hung over our heads for so long that we become numb to it. Most of my enjoyment of The Stranger came from this kind of constructed allegory between the events of the story and living in modern life.

The crux of it is that we are in an age of post-truth. We have so much information available to us that the full tragedy of human existence becomes a normal part of human life, and is thus continued without much resistance (i.e. fighting against it is an action not part of the approved list of choices that we can make with our lives). We see this, having no idea how to handle it, and essentially give up on the idea that we will (a) have a complete grasp of it and (b) be able to do anything about it.

Post-truth is a very buzzwordy term, but I think it fits well as a component of an absurd world. The irrationality and mechanisms of the absurd have been documented so much that we can't understand it. I mean, Camus' writing is nearing a century old, and we're still talking about it like it has the capacity to solve the world's problems. Post-truth allows these systems to operate even after their existence has been exposed to the world (hence the name), since it fosters the same kind of dumb inaction, but this time out of paralysis.

Trying to escape post-truth

I guess the reason I wanted to write this was trying to articulate the course of my life for the next 10 years. I'm nearing on a significant milestone for living, and I've been fairly disappointed with how my life has gone so far. I've lived in such extreme inertia that major opportunties have passed me by, and so I'm stuck here trying to piece together a life that I can enjoy.

I'd like to live my life in reverence of art. I'm using that in a very broad sense of the word, encapsulating pretty much any work that posseses value in consuming it. I think this will help me move out of post-truth paralysis in that a good piece of art provides a closed system of truth (this is one of the reasons I decided to study math, since it's a quintessential example of what I'm talking about). A good book or piece of music can exist independent of the infinite discourse and documentation that surrounds everything nowadays, which create the noise of information that post-truth comfortably rests on. By trying to reject a large part of this discourse by engaging essentially only with the primary source, I can minimize that noise. Of course, dialogue is great, but it should be contained and not contaminated by the caustic culture that's arisen recently (I had a great talk with my mom about The Stranger). I'm trying to live my life worrying less about weighing the nearly infinite amount of stuff that surrounds everything, and worrying more about appreciating the manifestations of truth that lay in a good book.