A few random thoughts, don’t know where they fit… I certainly agree life is objectively meaningless… First, are things in life absurd? Or is absurdity a property of expectations? When I think about absurdity, I think about a conflict, a contradiction, like a square sphere or a married bachelor, or Aileen Cannon’s ruling. What makes her ruling absurd is my expectation that she would be rational, factual, etc, and she is anything but. To label it “absurd” highlights how it upends my expectations and expresses my emotional reaction. Otherwise I might use another label like “wrong” or “evil” or “mindless.” But in terms of purpose, her ruling might be reasonable and astute—not absurd at all—in that it buys something for Trump in the moment. The FBI was pursuing Trump, she stuck out her foot and tripped them. That’s bad on so many levels, but absurd? I’m tempted to say “in itself, no.” But as an exercise in sound judicial procedure (the flagrantly disregarded expectation), it’s a total joke, it’s an absurd ruling.

So maybe the meaningless of life is not absurd except in the context of our desire for meaning? Don’t various spiritual disciplines point at eliminating our expectations of life in order to eliminate the sense of absurdity?

From an existential perspective, maybe it’s absurd that we are genetically programmed to look for meaning when there is none. Evolution ‘gave’ us our minds to solve problems of survival, to create conditions for our thriving. Our minds are like a hammer that has hammered down all the nails, so because “to a hammer, everything looks like a nail,” we hammer on things other than nails, with the absurdity being we don’t know how to stop doing something we know is “wrong”?