Life Doesn't Explain Why

I've always been interested in how much energy we spend trying to make life explain itself.

It shows up in therapy all the time, particularly around grief, relationships, burnout and unexpected changes in our lives. We want to understand why something happened, why someone behaved the way they did, why doing everything we thought was right still led somewhere we never expected to be. There is often a hope underneath all of that searching that if we can finally understand what happened, perhaps we can make peace with it.

Sometimes we can. Sometimes understanding our history, our relationships or our own patterns changes everything. But there are also experiences for which no explanation ever feels quite sufficient, and I think that is where Albert Camus still has something useful to say.

Camus wrote about the tension between our desire for life to have meaning and the uncomfortable reality that the universe doesn't necessarily provide us with one. He called that collision the absurd. What I find interesting is that his response wasn't simply nihilism or the conclusion that nothing matters. In The Myth of Sisyphus, he wrestled instead with how we might live when certainty, fairness and some larger explanation for our suffering aren't guaranteed.

That idea feels surprisingly relevant to psychotherapy because so much of our suffering can become tied not only to what happened, but to our struggle with the fact that it happened at all. We revisit the betrayal looking for an explanation that will finally make it understandable. We search for meaning in a loss because accepting its randomness feels unbearable. We wonder why years of hard work ended in burnout, or why a relationship into which we poured so much of ourselves still ended. Sometimes the mind keeps returning to the same questions because it believes there must be an answer capable of changing how the story feels.

There may not be.

I don't mean that cynically. In fact, I think there can be something freeing about recognizing that we don't have to solve every part of our lives before we are allowed to continue living them. Acceptance doesn't require us to believe that what happened was fair, deserved, necessary, or secretly part of some larger plan. It can simply mean acknowledging that this is now part of our story and deciding what kind of relationship we want to have with it.

That shifts the work in an important way. Instead of spending all of our energy asking why life failed to unfold as it should have, we can begin considering how we want to participate in the life that actually exists. We can love people knowing that relationships offer no guarantees, build things knowing they may not last, and allow ourselves to experience joy without demanding reassurance that it won't eventually be followed by loss.

I think this is one of the harder forms of freedom because it asks us to give up the bargain many of us unconsciously make with life: If I am good enough, careful enough, successful enough, loving enough, surely things will work out.

Sometimes they do. Sometimes they don't.

Camus doesn't offer much comfort if what we want is a universe that promises otherwise. What he offers instead is the possibility that a meaningful life doesn't depend on receiving that promise. We can acknowledge uncertainty, unfairness and impermanence without concluding that nothing matters. In some ways, knowing that nothing is guaranteed may be precisely what allows us to appreciate what is here while it is here.

Perhaps we don't need life to explain itself before we decide that it is worth participating in fully.

And perhaps meaning is less something we eventually discover hidden underneath everything that happens to us, and more something we continue creating through the way we choose to live in response.