MIND THE GAP:

Even the idea that life seems to be have no overall purpose or meaning doesn't make life absurd, unless you already expect life to have some such meaning. Which, perhaps unfortunately, we do. Remember what Camus said. You can't call the world absurd just because it seems to lack any rhyme or reason from our point of view. What's absurd is that, even knowing this, we can't give up on demanding reasons, meaning, something.

Nagel has a slightly different take. The tension is between thinking what we do is important, but knowing that from a more objective perspective that it's not. He says, "We cannot live human lives without energy and attention, nor without making choices which show that we take some things more seriously than others. Yet we have always available a point of view outside the particular form of our lives, from which the seriousness appears gratuitous. These two inescapable viewpoints collide in us, and that is what makes life absurd. It is absurd because we ignore the doubts that we know cannot be settled, continuing to live with nearly undiminished seriousness in spite of them." [...]

Anyway, I think situational irony is meta-absurdity. The absurd thing is that we expect, demand, and crave meaning from life, even though we are always aware, at least peripherally, that from a larger perspective, we can't really believe, or at least can't prove, that life actually has any meaning.

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