the.com/meaninglessness

The suspicion that the universe never signed the contract you think you're living under.

means The quality of lacking purpose, significance, or sense — the state of being empty of meaning.

from Built from 'meaning' (from Old English 'mænan,' to intend or signify) plus the negating '-less' and the noun-forming '-ness.' The word itself is a 19th-century assembly job — philosophy and literature needed a noun for the void, so English bolted one together from parts already lying around, rather than importing some older, grander root. Its rise tracks the rise of existentialist thought, which needed exactly this kind of plain, load-bearing word to name what classical vocabularies hadn't needed to.

philosophical term
central to absurdism and existentialist thought
camus take
the gap between wanting meaning and finding none
not the same as
nihilism, which says nothing matters at all
common fix
humans invent meaning anyway, daily, on purpose
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