Hello, everyone. I'm Stephen West. This is philosophize this. You know, there's a lot of notifications that come up on your phone that just bring up negative feelings.

The news app that tells you the world is ending, the bank telling you your accounts overdrawn, text messages from your family, telling you about God knows what.

Look, I got one ambition in this entire world and that's to make a podcast for a release in episode. It comes up on your phone as a notification and it produces nothing but positive feelings.

Like, wow, looking forward to listening later. If that's a feeling you've ever had with this podcast, then it warms the ventricles of my heart.

Thanks to the people out there who give back Patreon, philosophizes.org. I hope you love the show today.

So one of the things people have requested the most over the years on this podcast are more episodes on Albeir Camus.

He was a French Algerian absurdist philosopher known for his fiction, nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature, I think 11 different times.

And I thought it might be interesting to think about what he would possibly have to say to this hypothetical protagonist we've been talking about in our ongoing creation of Meaning series.

For anyone who's unaware or for anyone who's listened to the podcast for the first time today, the premise of this series goes something like this.

Imagine someone who doesn't believe in a God, doesn't believe that there's any sort of intrinsic meaning or moral code written into the universe.

How does that person not only start creating a system of values, but how do you ground it in something that is on one hand open ended enough for you to revise your values with new circumstances that you find yourself in.

But on the other hand, have it be enduring enough that your feelings in a given moment don't dictate everything that you do.

What mistakes do we got to look out for if we're trying to manufacture stability in an unstable universe? That's the premise here.

And it should be said, Kamu is not the guy that's going to think that the solution to existential dread is for someone to just create a system of meaning out of thin air.

However, that's not to say that he wouldn't have a lot of good advice to give someone that was embarking out on that sort of quest.

In fact, the main character in one of his final books called The Fall, a book released just a couple years before he died in a car accident when he was clearly about to head into a new direction with his work.

The main character of The Fall in many ways can be seen as a great example of what not to do as someone creating a system of meaning.

Because it might be tempting at first to think that the biggest obstacle in your way to finding meaning in life is the fact that you live in a disinterested universe that doesn't care about you.

And that's certainly something we've considered this. We've talked about Bovoire, Nietzsche, Kerkegard, Becker, Chiron, and all the rest of them.

But something can move in particular is going to warn us about in this book. Dare I say better than all the others are the pitfalls of self-deception.

In other words, you can have the greatest plan in the world, right?

You can come up with a dynamic pluralistic value system that represents exactly who you want to be, and you can be religiously committed to carrying it out.

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