The Absurd adj. 1. Ridiculously incongruous or unreasonable. See Synonyms at foolish. 2. Of, relating to, or manifesting the view that there is no order or value in human life or in the universe. 3. Of or relating to absurdism or the absurd. n. The condition or state in which humans exist in a meaningless, irrational universe wherein people's lives have no purpose or meaning. Used chiefly with the. The absurd is most often spoken of in reference to Camus. For brevity’s sake, here I am just going to give my ideas on what the absurd is in light of my nihilistic beliefs. The first definition represents the true meaning of absurd, simple incongruity. It is from the fact that in modern times life has increasingly been described as absurd that the latter definitions have arisen. It’s interesting though, definition number two gives the consequences of a belief in the absurdity of life but doesn’t define what it is that is absurd, what is incongruent. For me, the incongruency is quite blatant. A divide exists between everything I’ve been told, both explicitly and implicitly, about life while growing up and what I’ve learned after learning the skills of deductive logic and rationality. On the one side you have a purposive, teleological view of life filled with wonderful gifts which are intrinsically good in themselves. On the other side there is the pessimistic, and realistic, perspective of life as devoid not only of intrinsic value, but consequential as well, with no purpose or reason for anything we do and nothing to look forward in this life or another. That might as well be the definition of incongruency.   A hidden assumption here is that the incongruency is unsolvable. If it were solvable, the absurd would end at definition one and we would never reach the bleakness of definition two. An impasse results because once you travel to the other side there really is no going back. You can look back and think that it was better before, but you can’t go back because you realize that you were only deluding yourself before into believing that it was better. Once you’re cured of your delusion, it is damn near impossible to recover it. I can’t think of any way short of direct destruction of brain tissue through either some sort of lobotomy or drug abuse. The result would be a loss of cognition and memory, just what we need to return to our delusional state. So, it’s rationality that is the cause of this impasse – an absurdity within the absurdity. We have an incongruent opinion of rationality because on one side it’s been our constant companion in a life of inquiry and knowledge quenching. On the other hand, this supposedly great companion has led us down a road of self-destruction and meaninglessness. Yet we cannot give up either of these contradictory opinions because they are both true (in a sense): we both desire to be happy and desire to have knowledge. It’s absurd. The same holds for the macro-absurdity. We both want to agree with whatever conclusions our reason brings us to (nihilism) and we want to live a euphoric life of delusion were we don’t have to think about nihilism and it’s dire consequences. There is no solution to this dilemma. We must just live. We’ll think about it sometimes, other times not. We’ll choose one way one day and another the next because we desire both and because we know both are equally meaningless. It’s absurd.