"Yet a day comes when a man notices or says that he is thirty. Thus he asserts his youth. But simultaneously he situates himself in relation to time. He takes his place in it. He admits that he stands at a certain point on a curve that he acknowledges having to travel to its end. He belongs to time, and by the horror that seizes him, he recognizes his worst enemy. Tomorrow, he was longing for tomorrow, whereas everything in him ought to reject it. That revolt of the flesh is the absurd."
— The Myth of Sisyphus

I turned 30 today. Camus's point about hitting thirty, I assume, is not nearly about the number, rather the realization. The absurdity of all. I think it came onto me a few years earlier. And I remember being extremely agitated, glum, and mostly cold. Often unfriendly towards my peers. It was then I first realized, nothing really matters in the long run. If I attain greatness or succumb to the darkest of evil, all that vanishes. Eventually. There is no grandeur and death is the finality. I was surely afraid of death.

It wasn't until a few years later I realized that I was not cowering under the claws of death, I was fearful of the implications it entails. And that fear is the inability to face the absurd.

Camus wasn't wrong about how we yearn to grow older, we long for tomorrow. I did the same and I don't remember living. Looking back it's all hazy. Like I did not exist only until a few years ago. Where have all those years gone then? A friend of mine was wondering recently whether they can recognize the days of happiness. If they are gone already and you're unaware, can you make it through the days of despair? And how long can you take it till you say to yourself, I have had enough? The next step is to die or face the absurd.

None of these choices are easy of course. It's certainly not easy to live. But it takes a whole lot more to prepare yourself to die—so Seneca said. And then facing the absurd can often be too ominous to even contemplate.

One implicit question here is—since I had the absurd hit me earlier than 30, am I grown enough now to run headlong and crush the absurd, since I got a few years on it? Hardly. Nothing really changed. I couldn't use the time, the only weapon I have against the absurd. And despite the route to nihilism, there's my cognitive dissonance of trying to make meaning out of a meaningless existence. To persist, to accomplish, and to be cherished. Is it not the path of the absurd too? Perhaps not manifested now, but there's a great chance it will be when that hope for "someday" will pass. Can I recognize that someday? or will I drift under the illusion and only the deathbed will strike the final blow of rude awakening?

This is something I have to find out for myself. And Camus or any number of great men and women cannot help. I can dub it as a new beginning, but to mark a beginning, something has to change drastically first. And that logical step is due.

Thank you for reading this rambling.