the semester and i'm just going through and that's that's the way my life is and camus thinks that that experience which you can sometimes have reveals something true about what human lives are like our lives really just are like the life of sisyphus who rolls this boulder up the hill from morning till night and then at night he gets to the top and it rolls back down to the bottom over the course of the night he walks back down and then he starts it all over again and he says sisyphus is condemned to this life like we're condemned to our lives but we do have one bit of freedom and it's the only thing that we can hang on to it's the freedom to stick it to the gods who put us in this position by embracing this existence rather than giving up and committing suicide and i thought well it's kind of a happy ending but but but i also thought it it's a dim view of what our our existence amounts to so i i think there's something fascinating about that but what i came to believe and i tried to write about this once i know you read the thing about aliveness that i published once that's secretly a criticism of camus i don't think i mentioned camu in there but i think camus has got the phenomenon wrong or he's missed some important aspect of it because in camus view when you experience your day as sort of going on in this deadening way and you're just doing the things that you always do the way you always do them for camus that reveals the truth about what our lives are but i think there's some aspect at least for me and maybe maybe he just didn't feel this or didn't have access to it maybe others don't but for me there's an extra part to it which is somehow that yes that's the way things are and it's inadequate and there's something that's missing from that aspect of our existence that could be there and it feels like our lives are not about just putting up with that and sticking it to the gods by embracing it but seeking that absence part of it the part that's recognizable in its absence in your experience of that and that's that's what i think i think we do have the experience of the presence of that in moments when you feel truly alive and that's what you mean by the word aliveness which is a fascinating and a powerful word yeah that's what i mean by it i mean i think most people can recognize moments in their lives when they really felt alive and it could happen in a moment when you know i don't know maybe miles davis felt it in that moment when he was responding to herbie hancock's cord or maybe you feel it in that moment where you grab for the hand on the first date and the gesture is reciprocated or maybe you feel it in some moment when you are doing a kind of peak athletic thing or watching somebody else do a peak athletic thing um but i think there are moments when we when it feels like it's not like the way camus is describing things and it's better because of that so i think one really powerful way to uh for me to understand aliveness is to think about to go into a darker territory is to think about suicide and i've known people in my life who suffer from clinical
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