Absurdism is most closely tied to the French-Algerian writer Albert Camus and the 1940s. It names the collision between our hunger for meaning and a universe that answers only with silence — the “absurd.” Rather than escape that tension through false hope or despair, Camus argued we should face it honestly and live fully anyway; his essay The Myth of Sisyphus ends by asking us to imagine Sisyphus, endlessly pushing his boulder, as happy. It is a cousin to existentialism, but insists on joy in defiance.