The Philosophy

The Problem

What Absurdism got right, and what it left unanswered.

Any serious philosophy must begin with what is actually true, even when what is actually true is uncomfortable.

Absurdism, as articulated by Albert Camus in the middle of the twentieth century, is the most honest diagnosis of the human condition available. The diagnosis runs as follows. Human beings are creatures who demand meaning—we cannot help it, it is structural to how we think and feel and organise our lives. We require reasons, narratives, purposes. We need to know why. The universe, however, offers no answer to this demand. It is silent, indifferent, and entirely uninterested in our requirement for significance.

The collision between our demand for meaning and the universe's silence is what Camus called the Absurd. It is not a property of the world alone, nor of the human mind alone, but of the confrontation between the two. We are meaning-seeking creatures in a meaning-free universe, and this mismatch is the fundamental condition of conscious existence.

Camus identified three possible responses to the Absurd, and rejected all three. Physical suicide accepts the Absurd's verdict. Philosophical suicide resolves the confrontation by refusing to see it clearly—this includes religious faith and ideological commitment. Resignation accepts the Absurd passively, waiting for death.

Camus proposed a fourth response: Absurd revolt. The absurd hero lives consciously within the contradiction. They neither resolve it nor succumb to it. They embrace life precisely because it is finite, meaningless, and absurd.

"One must imagine Sisyphus happy."
— Camus
Wayfarism asks: and then what?

Absurdism is correct. As a diagnosis, it is essentially complete. But Absurdism is a stance, not a practice. It tells you how to hold your situation. It does not tell you what to do on Tuesday morning.

A diagnosis is not a treatment. Absurdism tells us how to hold our situation. It does not tell us what to do on Tuesday.

Motion

The first level. Keep going. That is enough.

Motion is the floor. It asks nothing philosophical of you. It asks only that you move.

To understand why Motion is necessary, one must understand what it works against. Depression and anxiety are self-reinforcing conditions. Depression reduces activity, and reduced activity deepens depression. Anxiety promotes avoidance, and avoidance increases anxiety. Both disorders share a crucial feature: they disable the very capacities needed to recover from them.

This is the bootstrapping problem. You cannot pull yourself up by your own bootstraps because your boots are in a locked room and the condition has hidden the key. Standard advice fails here. "Just do something" assumes the capacity to just do.

The counterintuitive truth—well-established in behavioural psychology—is that action generates motivation more reliably than motivation generates action. Do the thing, and the feeling sometimes follows. Or it doesn't follow, but the thing is done regardless.

"Feed the dog. Fix the door. Move before the mind fully wakes to its misery."

If internal motivation is unavailable, external demand becomes essential. An external demand is a claim made on you by something outside yourself: a person, an animal, a commitment, a deadline. The dog does not care about your depression. The dog needs feeding. This is annoying, intrusive, relentless—and exactly what is needed.

Concrete work is work with visible results. The garage door was broken; now it works. The dishes were dirty; now they are clean. This concreteness matters because it provides feedback that depressive cognition cannot distort. Your mind may tell you that you are worthless—but the fixed garage door is a fact, indifferent to interpretation.

Motion is correct and necessary. For the person in crisis, it is sufficient. But for the person standing upright, asking what to do with their aliveness — Motion alone is a floor without walls. The second level builds from here.

Bearing

The second level. Choose your road. Walk it with open eyes.

Bearing is a navigational term. It means the direction of travel relative to a fixed point. It implies movement — but oriented movement. A person with a bearing is going somewhere, even if somewhere is partly invented, even if the road needs revision, even if it is muddier than the map suggested.

Bearing is the second level of Wayfarism. It is the orientation that transforms motion into direction. It does not replace Motion—the floor remains, and you will return to it—but it builds upon Motion by asking the question Motion declines to ask: not just how to keep going, but where.

Bearing has four pillars:

• Mastery — A craft or skill pursued with genuine attention.
• Transmission — The deliberate act of passing something on.
• Chosen Cause — A direction larger than personal competence or family.
• Levity — Seriousness held lightly.

The Bearing is chosen, not given. This is not a weakness — it is the only honest kind.

The Four Pillars

What Bearing is made of.