What it Means to Say Life is Absurd

A simple analogy that bypasses the pretentious existential jargon

One of the clichés in modern philosophy is that life is absurd. As to what that cliché means, you’re supposed to wade through some of the most pretentious prose, by Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre, to understand it in much depth.

But to clarify that declaration of life’s absurdity, consider this simple analogy that struck me recently as I was walking some friends’ dog, named Dolche, around the suburban block near where they live.

Encountering Absurdity While Walking a Dog

Dolche is a medium-sized, strong dog who was rescued from an animal shelter, and as we were walking along the sidewalk, Dolche saw a smaller dog — let’s call her Lilly — who was being walked perhaps thirty meters in the distance. Instantly Dolche became restless, and she strained the leash to attempt to visit Lilly.

But Dolche can be unpredictable around strangers, so I had to restrain her by keeping hold of the leash and pulling her back. When she saw she wouldn’t be able to inspect or challenge Lilly, Dolche hurried to the grass beside the sidewalk and urinated to mark her territory.

What’s crucial here for the analogy is that Dolche’s whole being was focussed on Lilly in that moment. Nothing else mattered and her reason for urinating a little (in public, of course) was that, on the off chance that Lilly would return to that spot, she might realize that that territory was claimed and be dissuaded from roaming there in the future. Or perhaps Dolche took Lilly’s presence as a sign that other dogs might be around, too, so she marked her territory as a general warning against dogs who have a habit of walking with their nose pressed to the ground to sniff out the slightest trace of urine.

From a dog’s perspective, this behaviour makes perfect sense, but from the standpoint of the human walking the dog, this was all quite absurd. Of course, the territory in question isn’t Dolche’s to mark. It belongs to the Canadian government and to the human homeowners who live on that block. Moreover, neither dog was poised to choose where to go since they’re pets controlled by leashes.

What’s absurd here, then, is the striking contrast between what seems of paramount importance from the dog’s perspective — searching for threats and marking territory with the scent of urine — and the reality of the situation that’s beyond the dog’s comprehension.

Dolche reverted to her wild instincts, unaware that there are few threats in Canadian suburbs, and that she and Lilly are both pets who live at the behest of their human owners. And as an animal, Dolche feels no shame in voiding her bowels or in urinating in public. Consequently, though, not only did she mark territory over which she has no claim, but she did so in a wholly ineffective and pointless way, not to mention one that’s distasteful to the people who control the area.

Recognizing the Extent of our Vanity

Existential absurdity, then, is this gross mismatch between what seems all-important and what’s really the case. The subjective estimations of value turn out to be vain because objectively they’re delusory.

Obviously, if a human behaved like Dolche and urinated in public at the sign of an approaching dog or fellow human, that person would be locked away for psychiatric evaluation. We understand why dogs do what they do because they’re animals rather than people. But unless we torture ourselves by reading philosophy, what we don’t often appreciate is that the same lessons apply to people, albeit at a higher level of analysis.

Every facet of my objectively strange outing with Dolche applies to human societies.

We, too, take for granted our cultural norms, our hobbies, pastimes, jobs, vacations, and so on. The conventions that regulate this human behaviour fade into the background for us, as we seldom ponder their justifications. We just automatically get in our car and drive somewhere, or we wake up and brush our teeth, go to work, watch television, have sex, sit on a toilet, eat at a restaurant, walk a dog on a leash around the block, keep a wallet in our back pocket, wash our clothes in a washing machine, check the weather station to see whether it will rain, mow the lawn, put used plastic in a blue box, and say “I’m sorry for your loss” at a funeral.

Every single detail of ordinary, First World human life is perfectly absurd — as in delusional — from the yet higher perspective afforded by science and philosophy. Objectively, from the universe’s standpoint as far as we can fathom it, nothing we do in our mundane lives makes sense. We’re in Dolche’s position and don’t know it, just like she doesn’t understand how preposterous her behaviour is.

For instance, just as Dolche thinks she owns or controls the territory she marks, we think we own our property, but that’s just a legal fiction. No one owns anything in nature, and our “rights” over what we buy in society depend on mass hallucinations and on faith in religious or secular myths.

If Dolche’s scramble to shore up her control over her territory was ludicrous (and if it’s constantly so, since she behaves the same way whenever she’s walked four times a day), so is every human vanity that flies in the face of our objective standing in a godless, inhuman universe.

Of course, you can’t blame dogs for coping with life with the limited traits they have at their disposal. How else were wild dogs supposed to compete to strengthen their species but by sending urine signals to take advantage of their strong sense of smell? Our species has many more tricks to perform, thanks to our cerebrum and our opposable thumbs which enable us to build practically whatever we can imagine.

But this is only to identify the Kafkaesque dimension of life’s absurdity. Sure, we can’t be blamed for using our limited techniques, but those skills are pitifully inadequate to the task of grappling with cosmic reality. Pet owners love their pets, but it’s hard not to pity a dog on a leash that thinks it’s responsible for guarding a suburban block. And as powerful and relatively enlightened as people may be, it’s hard not to pity us for our more grandiose presumptions and complacency.

That pitiable aspect of our plight is a facet of life’s absurdity.

And now that you understand what it means, roughly, to say that life is absurd, the question is what we should do about it.