Camus, the absurd, and why I deleted my morning routine.

For about two years I had a morning routine of the kind the internet approves of. Cold water. Sunlight. Journaling. A protein target before nine. A first coffee timed to some cortisol curve I read about once. It was a good routine by the metrics a routine is judged by. It had also become a small daily bureaucracy that I administered, diligently, on behalf of a future self who never showed up to thank me.

I deleted most of it after rereading Camus. This is not the essay you expect from that sentence.

The absurd, briefly

Camus's "absurd" is not a fancy word for "silly." It names a specific collision: between our demand for meaning and a universe that does not answer. We want the world to cohere. The world declines to comment. The gap between the asking and the silence is the absurd.

His move in The Myth of Sisyphus is to refuse both easy exits. Do not fill the gap with a borrowed metaphysics. He calls that "philosophical suicide." Do not fill it by leaving either. Stay in the gap. Live there, clear-eyed, and (the hard part) cheerfully.

One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

The line is famous enough to be a fridge magnet. What the magnet drops is what it costs. Sisyphus is happy not because the boulder finally stays put. It never will. He is happy because he has stopped negotiating with the boulder for a meaning the boulder was never going to give him.

What this has to do with cold water

Here is the connection I missed for two whole years. Optimization culture is, structurally, a meaning substitute. It takes the absurd, the plain fact that no arrangement of habits will make a finite life add up, and offers a deferral. Not an answer. A deferral. You do not have meaning yet, but you have a system, and the system is trending up.

The morning routine, run in that spirit, is philosophical suicide in miniature. It papers over the gap. Every completed checklist is a tiny daily promise that the coherence is coming, that the sunlight and the journaling and the protein will, in aggregate, sum to a life that makes sense. They will not. Not because the habits are bad. Several of mine were good. But because making-sense was never something a checklist could deliver. Wrong tool. Wrong category of thing.

The absurd test for a habit

I did not delete the routine because routines are bad. I deleted it, then added a few things back, and the filter I used was one question.

Cold water did not survive the note. It never did. It was always a payment toward a future audit. Once you cancel the audit, standing in cold water is just standing in cold water, and I do not want to do that.

The morning walk survived instantly. I would take the walk on the last morning of a meaningless universe. It is not an investment in anything. It is good, now, in itself. Reading survived. The protein target survived in a weaker form. I still eat enough protein, since the physiology is real and I coach people on exactly this, but I stopped scoring it. The scoring was the part that belonged to the deferral. The eating did not.

The absurd is not a permission slip

I want to be careful here, because "nothing adds up, so do nothing" is the precise misreading Camus spent a whole book trying to head off. The absurd does not license drift. If anything it does the opposite. Recognising the absurd raises the stakes of the present, because the present stops being a means to a settlement that is not coming. Sisyphus still pushes the boulder. He pushes it well. He just does not stand around waiting for the hill to issue a verdict.

In practice this made me more disciplined about fewer things, not less disciplined about everything. A short list of habits you would defend on the last morning of the universe is a far more honest list than a long one held together with an IOU.

What is left

A walk. Coffee, whenever I want it. Reading before the phone. Enough protein, uncounted. That is the routine now. It is not optimised and it is not trending anywhere. That, it turns out, was the point I had been missing. A handful of things that are good in themselves, done by someone who has stopped waiting for the boulder to stay put.

One must imagine the morning happy.