Both existentialism and absurdism contain valuable insights. For a quick and dirty recap: existentialism is the belief that the universe is inherently meaningless and therefore humans must choose to create our own meaning. Absurdism, while closely related, has some important differences. Not only is the universe meaningless, but we are beings who are inherently purposeful and constantly seeking meaning. So we are faced with an absurdity: we are purposeful beings engulfed in a purposeless cosmos, fated to constantly seek objective meaning where none can be found. Camus, the father of absurdism, argued that we have to come to terms with this absurdity and contentedly seek out meaning anyway.
Personally, I prefer absurdism because it doesn’t hinge on what Sartre called ‘radical freedom’, the idea that each of us can, or must, choose our own fate. This idea, closely related to traditional ‘bootstrappy’ notions of free will, is a convenient thought, but it doesn’t line up with what science has revealed to us about the universe. We are too constrained by our past and our circumstance to be ‘radically free’. It feels good to think that we can be whoever we want to be and make everything better with just a snap of our fingers, but that’s simply not the case. First of all, I agree with Hume that reason is a slave to the passions, so many (if not all) of our decisions are motivated by feelings that are largely out of our control. Secondly, we had no say in our past circumstances that led to our existence, nor do we have complete control over what happens to us in the future. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could just will away our illnesses, our moods, our pain, our suffering? While there may be a few extraordinary folks out there who are capable of doing so (I’m dubious), it remains the case that us mere mortals are highly constrained; we must learn to navigate in a world where we aren’t in complete control. And that’s okay. Recognizing this should motivate our compassion and forgiveness, for others as well as ourselves.
Long story short, I’m partial to absurdism because it is less focused on free will and more focused on resolving the fundamental tensions of the human condition; absurdism is less naively choice-oriented and more grounded in reality as we know it.
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