Sisyphus and the Meaning of Life

Is life meaningful? Is it worth living? In his celebrated essay 'The Myth of Sisyphus' (originally written in French, 1942), Albert Camus describes suicide as the 'one truly serious' problem of philosophy, and sees the question of whether life is worth living as tantamount to that of whether we should end our own lives. He suggests that, when we contemplate the universe with 'lucidity', we feel 'an alien, a stranger'. It is this 'incalculable feeling' of 'divorce' between us and the universe that he refers to as absurdity, and he associates it with the sense that there is no 'profound reason for living'.