Why don’t you kill yourself? Albert Camus began his book The Myth of
Sisyphus with the startling assertion “There is but one truly serious philosophical
problem and that is suicide.” A French novelist and philosopher
who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1957, Camus said that judging
whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental
question of philosophy. If life is meaningless, there is no point to pursuing
traditional philosophical questions about the nature of reality, knowledge,
and morality.