Camus and Coffee - On the little things
Famed nihilist writer Albert Camus once wrote, “Should I kill myself or have a cup of coffee?”
What does that mean?
Well, on its own, it’s a provocative invitation to all of us, to question what it is that we’re doing. Everyday, we choose life over death. We choose life over death every time we get up in the morning. We choose it every time to go to work. We choose it every time we love our family and friends. Hell, we choose it every time we sip our coffee. We do these things because the alternative is, well, simply put, death. Right?
In the context of his larger quote, the idea inculcates much of what it means to choose life and to suffer well.
I don’t know what to do today, help me decide. Should I cut myself open and pour my heart on these pages? Or should I sit here and do nothing, nobody’s asking anything of me after all?
Should I jump off the cliff that has my heart beating so and develop my wings on the way down? Or should I step back from the edge, and let the others deal with this thing called courage?
Should I stare back at the existential abyss that haunts me so and try desperately to grab from it a sense of self? Or should I keep walking half-asleep, only half-looking at it every now and then in times in which I can’t help doing anything but?
Should I kill myself or have a cup of coffee?
It’s a charged and instigating idea. It’s more than nihilistic; it’s absurd. And yet, as the old saying goes, if life is absurd, we should be absurd with it. Leaning into this quote, it’s easy to philosophize the nature of suffering. Between the lines above, you picture the pouring out of oneself, the desperate attempts to understand the messiness of life, the sad and fraught attempts to rationalize the irrational.
Every amateur philosopher and esoteric guru have their own reasonable take. Perhaps its after Beauvoir, arguing that our deaths do not belong to ourselves but instead to those whom still live and are left behind. Perhaps its after Marcus Aurelius, arguing that as long as we have what it takes to live up to the job of being a human being, we are ethically bound to continue. Perhaps still, it’s after Alan Noble’s On Getting Out of Bed in the Morning: The Burden and Gift of Living, who argues that, while some may “…suffer from diagnosed mental illnesses, some from undiagnosed, and some from mental suffering that has no medical categorization yet is no less real and terrible and hard,” our continued existence is nonetheless “good.”
Camus himself argued that suicide was the only philosophical problem. And there’s an extent to which pondering this question is a form of pleasure. It may humorously be called philosophical masturbation. To the negative extent, those conclusions drawn may further entrench somebody into a harmful lifestyle or even reinforce those who are farcically pretentious. Picture the guy that takes ayahuasca, and upon returning to baseline consciousness, decides that his purpose in life is to start a B2B SaaS tech company. That’s not a serious philosophical breakthrough, right?
Anyway, what does any of this have to do with coffee?
Coffee is a little thing, after all. It’s something most people have first thing in the morning or on their way to an office. It might be tied up in a weekend ritual. It’s a good that financial analysts love to argue that millennials buy too much of. I mean, sure, a single coffee tree produces about a single pound of coffee each harvest and the average American consumes three cups of coffee a day, translating to about 36 pounds of coffee a year, and each little bean travels from a far-away land to be roasted, packaged, and then shipped again to distributors or directly to consumers - meaning that the average coffee bean travels more miles in a year than many Americans can afford to do - but it’s considered a little thing. So again, what does this little thing have to do with suicide?
Everything. It has everything to do with that little thing, as well as every other little thing. Sure, philosophizing can be fun, but what good is that if every single day, you’re hanging by an existential thread? To someone like Camus, having a cup of coffee is about as inherently meaningful (or meaningless) as suicide. However, if one chooses to embrace that cup of coffee as a a type of purpose, then they should lean wholeheartedly into that cup. Likewise, if one chooses to celebrate their relationships as an affirmation of a life worth living, then each moment spent in relationship with others is proof of a worthy existence.
Essentially, any little thing can provide meaning, and every bit of meaning can provide life. Every little conscious action allows you to revolt against the absurdity of life, against the meaninglessness of our existence. In other words, by getting out of bed, drinking your coffee, calling your friend, or walking your dog, you are making a subtle protest that life is worth living despite its absurdity.
“The literal meaning of life is doing whatever prevents you from killing yourself.”
Header photo courtesy of Unsplash.