Standing On The Beach

Photo by Дмитрий Тяжкороб / Unsplash

There can be a kind of flatness that brings people into the therapy space. Not exactly despair — More a sense that nothing is solid. Work feels directionless. Your relationship feels conditional and insecure. The things that used to matter haven’t disappeared so much as gone quiet, and what’s left is a low, persistent question: what, exactly, is the point of any of this?

It’s tempting to call this depression and move on. Sometimes that’s accurate, and treating it as such is sensible. But sometimes what’s sitting in the room is something else: a person who has looked clearly at the world and found that the usual answers don’t hold up. Career doesn’t quite land. The standard cultural scripts, the ones about working hard, settling down, building something, all start to feel a bit thin when you actually examine them. The sense that there’s something wrong with you is the trap many of us fall into when in fact, this philosophical clarity may be closer to reality than the scripts you are chasing.

It’s also, I’d argue, a very contemporary problem, and not only at the individual level. Albert Camus, writing in the middle of the last century, described what he called the absurd: the gap between our demand for the world to make sense and the world’s complete silence on the matter. We want meaning. The universe doesn’t supply it. The universe doesn’t care. That gap doesn’t close, no matter how hard we think about it.¹

What’s changed since Camus’s time isn’t the gap. It’s that the gap has become a kind of public condition, visible at the level of whole societies, not just individual lives. It’s become so “baked in” that we don’t notice it. Institutions that used to supply a sense of coherence such as governments, religions, the media, have lost a great deal of their credibility, and nothing especially solid has replaced them. In particular is the loss of the belief and trust in each other as vested interests serve to profit only themselves. The result isn’t a society that has collectively faced the absurd and found its own version of revolt. It’s more a society that is struggling to understand, blaming themselves or each other, and all the while going along with the game.

You can see this play out in a few different ways. There’s the retreat into irony, particularly among younger people, where keeping everything at a slight comic distance becomes a way of never being caught caring too much about anything that might let you down. Or being anti-everything in a hardened rejection of all, wanting to burn everything but with no clear sense of what to replace it with. Those are understandable as a defence but the trouble is that it tends to harden into something structural: the irony stops protecting sincerity and starts replacing it, until sincerity itself starts to look a bit embarrassing — the protest begins to look formulaic and predictable. Ignorable.

There’s also the retreat into the great panacea of consumption, an economy that runs on the promise that the next purchase, the next update, the next experience will be the one that finally fills the space. This doesn’t resolve anything either. It just makes the question easier to avoid noticing, for a while, until the next thing is needed.

And then there’s a colder response, one that’s harder to look at directly: when nothing feels legitimate, when no institution or shared story seems to be holding anything together, destruction itself can start to feel like the only honest act left. Burn it down, because at least burning it down is real. This is nihilism (the conviction that nothing carries any weight or value at all)² with momentum, and it’s where the absence of meaning stops being a private ache and becomes something with consequences for everyone around it.

None of these responses are exactly wrong, in the sense that they’re all reactions to something real. The silence Camus described is genuinely there. Institutions genuinely have lost credibility in ways that aren’t always unjustified. Money is consumed at a rate proportionate to its creation through every stage of life. The question is what gets done with that recognition, and so far, as a culture, we don’t seem to be doing much with it beyond distraction, detachment, or destruction.

So what do you do with that, once you’ve noticed it, in your own life if not in the culture at large?

Camus’s answer was not to look away, and not to manufacture a consoling story either. He thought both of those moves were a kind of surrender. What he proposed instead was something he called revolt. Not revolt as in burning things down, but as a stance: you see the absurd clearly, you don’t pretend it isn’t there, and you go on living and creating and caring about things anyway. His image for this was Sisyphus, endlessly rolling his boulder up the hill, watching it roll back down, starting again. Camus’s point wasn’t that Sisyphus finds a way to make the boulder meaningful. It’s that Sisyphus is still the one pushing it. The task doesn’t change. But what he brings to it is his. He has created a meaning. Taken ownership of his story.

The task doesn’t change. But what he brings to it is his.

This is where, for me, narrative therapy becomes useful in a way I didn’t expect when I first started this work. It can sit so perfectly within the framework of philosophical thought, of the existential experience of life.

One of the central concepts in narrative therapy is paying attention to what we call unique outcomes: moments that don’t fit the dominant story a person tells about themselves. Someone says nothing ever works out for them, and then mentions, almost in passing, a time something did. Someone says they’re incapable of connection, and then describes a moment, brief, maybe years ago, where they weren’t. These moments don’t disprove the larger story. They don’t magically turn “nothing works out” into “everything will be fine now.” What they do is show that the story isn’t total. There was a crack in it. Something didn’t fit.

That’s Camus’s revolt, in miniature, something I think is worth noticing, that it’s the opposite move to the cultural responses described above. Irony keeps you at a distance from caring. Consumption distracts you from the question. Destruction answers the silence with more silence, just louder. The unique outcome does none of that. It’s small, specific, and it stays with the difficulty rather than escaping it. It steps to the side of the game.

There’s another idea in narrative therapy called the absent but implicit, and it’s the one I keep coming back to with clients who are sitting in this flatness. The idea is that when someone says nothing matters, that statement carries an echo of what would matter, if it were there. You can’t feel the absence of connection unless connection has some kind of value to you. You can’t feel that nothing means anything unless meaning is something you were looking for. The flatness isn’t indifference. It’s closer to grief for something that hasn’t arrived, or has been lost, or was never quite available in the first place.

Camus made almost exactly this point. The absurd isn’t a flat, neutral observation. It’s passionate. Someone who genuinely felt nothing wouldn’t experience meaninglessness as a problem at all. The fact that it feels like a problem is, in a strange way, the evidence that something in the person is still very much alive and asking.

That last point matters in so many ways. If the flatness carries an echo of what would matter, then naming that echo is itself a discovery. Not a finding in the sense of recovering something that was lost intact and putting it back. More like locating a thread that was there all along, underneath the flatness, and discovering it can be picked up again. Beneath the surface, you are there, waiting to become. The small successes that we notice work the same way. Once noticed, they don’t stay isolated. Our brains take the new awareness and build connections to other moments as it seeks to illuminate the patterns. Other evidence begins to emerge, and slowly a second story starts to take shape alongside the first one. Not instead of it. Alongside it. That is you beginning to be empowered.

This is also where narrative therapy goes further than Camus was inclined to. He was right that the silence doesn’t resolve, and that no amount of re-authoring repairs a culture’s institutions or makes the universe start supplying meaning where it didn’t before. But within a life, a thickened story is power. It changes what’s available to act from. Someone who can see their own unique outcomes, who can name what the flatness has been pointing towards all along, has more to work with than someone who only has the negative, dismal dominant story. That’s a profound difference. It can be the difference between staying stuck in the flatness and finding a way to move within it.

What it can do, then, is change the relationship to the boulder, and change what the climb itself can hold. A life that’s been more fully told, with its unique outcomes noticed and its absent-but-implicit values named, isn’t a life that’s solved anything in a final sense. At first, the repetition is still there. The work, the relationships, the daily grind of getting up and doing it again, none of that disappears. But there’s a real difference between carrying a boulder you’ve stopped looking at, and carrying one you’ve turned to face, with some sense of why it matters to you that it gets carried at all. This is where choice becomes our greatest tool.

My assessment is that this is closer to what’s actually on offer, for most of us, most of the time. Not a cure for the absurd, either personal or cultural. But not simply enduring it either. It’s a finding who you are, what your preferences are, and, step by step, creating a world that you enjoy, one that works for you, regardless of the absurdity which surrounds you. A worthy goal.

References and further reading

¹ Camus, A. (1942). The Myth of Sisyphus (J. O’Brien, Trans.). Penguin Modern Classics.

² Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Nihilism”, plato.stanford.edu/entries/nihilism

A note for anyone who recognises the title of this post in another context: Standing on the Beach, a 1986 compilation by The Cure, includes a track inspired by Camus’s novel The Stranger. The connection between existentialist literature and popular music runs deeper, and longer, than people often assume.

To bring my own ideas and therapeutic style to these posts, I use AI to assist with referencing, drafting, editing, and checking that the thinking is academically sound. The writing remains largely my own.

Carrying it doesn’t have to be a solitary task

If any of this resonates, and you’d like some support in working through it, get in touch.

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