Like Victor Frankl Man's Search for Meaning, "Those who have a 'why' to live, can bear with almost any 'how'.", in other words, many feel that they can live with limited expectations, but they can't live without hope. What is hope? Hope is defined as to look forward to with desire and reasonable confidence, it's also a feeling of desire for something and confidence in the possibility of its fulfillment. I am not trying to be a Debbie Downer, but is hope all that? Henry Miller in a book titled The Cosmological Eye, wrote "Hope is a bad thing. It means that you are not what you want to be. It means that part of you is dead, if not all of you. It means that you entertain illusions." Friedrich Nietzsche in Human All too Human wrote "Hope is the worst of evils, for it prolongs the torment of men". How can we live without hope? We should embrace the madness as "it is what it is" this doesn't mean we become apathetic, indifferent, or passive, but engaged without expectation or hope of anything beyond this. This life may be lived without expectation or hope, because life has never promised us anything. Like being good for goodness sake, or to love truth for truth's sake, we should live life for life's sake. I think this means to survive, pass on our genes (if we're able or choose to), and participate or embrace the absurdity of life for life doesn't have any known destinations it's evolving toward. If scientific predictions are true (which they probably are), then the universe and thereby life will end in heat death. I think we may brush our teeth, exercise, take care of our health, etc. not to escape the absurd but to embrace it, this is our revolt, passion, and freedom. Like The Walking Dead we are all infected and no one will escape, yet they fight to survive for as Strand tells Nick in Fear the Walking Dead, “The only way to survive a mad world is to embrace the madness,” in other words, to make it your own. We may stop living like we got something to prove to ourselves and others, we can stop pretending to be someone we are not because it doesn’t matter and we should embrace this as it is, not escape it with the illusion of hope. As Meursault proclaimed in the Stranger “And I felt ready to live it all again too. As if that blind rage had washed me clean, rid me of hope; for the first time, in that night alive with signs and stars, I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world. Finding it so much like myself-so like a brother, really-I felt that I had been happy and that I was happy again." I think we should embrace the absurd don't try to escape it through hope or as Camus states it is "to live without appeal", in other words, stop looking over your shoulder for there is no one there who cares.
