Relax, Nothing Matters

Most people are waiting for the universe to explain itself.

It won’t.

You know the moment. You’re brushing your teeth, or driving somewhere ordinary, and the thought arrives without warning: what’s the point of all this? Wake up, commute, work, eat, sleep, repeat. We chase money we’ll never fully enjoy. We try to impress people we don’t even like. We follow unwritten rules set by a culture that seems just as confused as we are.

You’re not the first person to ask the question. The version of the answer I find most useful comes from Albert Camus.

For most of human history, meaning was handed out. You suffered, there was a plan. You struggled, it was a test. You died, reward awaited. Then science kept noticing things. Darwin, the Big Bang, the actual mechanics of how the world worked. The comforting old answers stopped being load-bearing. Nietzsche saw the writing first. “God is dead,” he wrote, and the line wasn’t a celebration. It was an observation. The framework was failing.

When you lose something important, you don’t just lose the thing. You lose the stability the thing was providing. With cosmic meaning withdrawn, people turned to nihilism: nothing matters, no purpose, no point. Existence, then nothing. Anxiety and dread moved into the empty room.

Camus did something different. He looked at the meaninglessness, agreed that yes, the universe doesn’t care and doesn’t answer, and then asked: what if that’s freedom?

He called the conflict the Absurd. Humans have a built-in instinct to look for meaning. The universe doesn’t supply any. You can scream why at the void as long as you like, and all you’ll ever hear back is silence. Most people experience this as a problem. Camus thought it was a key.

To explain it he reached for Sisyphus, the figure from Greek myth condemned to push a rock up a mountain forever. Every time it reaches the top, it rolls back down. Most people hear that and think that’s hell. Camus thought that’s everyone. Your job. Your goals. Your routine. Monday, push the rock. Tuesday, push it again. The big achievements don’t end the cycle. They produce a new rock.

But Camus said the key moment in Sisyphus’s story isn’t when he’s pushing. It’s when he walks back down the mountain. He knows the work is pointless. He knows he’ll do it again tomorrow. And he goes anyway. That choice, made fully, is freedom. Once you accept that life has no inherent meaning, you stop waiting for meaning to be delivered. You’re free to make your own.

This isn’t despair dressed up as wisdom. It’s the opposite. When you stop demanding cosmic significance from every choice, three things change.

First, you can drop the what if game. The job loss, the failed project, the decision that didn’t work out — none of these gets weighed on the universe’s scales. There aren’t any. Obsessing over the “right” decision assumes there’s a single correct path that meaning will eventually validate. There isn’t. Move.

Second, joy becomes a small rebellion. Every time you choose to be happy despite the universe’s silence, you’re refusing the deal it offered. The deal was: nothing matters, so nothing should feel good. You’re declining.

Third, “why not” becomes a real answer rather than a hesitation. The thing you’ve been considering trying stops needing cosmic permission. When nothing matters in the grand sense, every small thing becomes available.

The misunderstanding that scares people away from this view is that accepting meaninglessness will make them miserable. The opposite tends to happen. When you stop hunting for capital-M Meaning, the small joys actually become visible. Coffee in the morning. A friend laughing. The sun on your face on a Wednesday afternoon. None of this matters cosmically. All of it matters now.

Every morning, you have two choices. You can let the lack of inherent meaning crush you. Or you can use it: as the floor of permission you’ve been waiting for, the proof that you can write your own story without anyone’s approval.

The universe doesn’t owe you meaning. You don’t owe it any either.

That isn’t a tragedy. That’s the deal. And it’s a better one than the alternative.