Camus never published a parenting book. He should have
Field Note · Parenting
Have you ever been that child who came home genuinely upset because something unfair happened? Your friend was selected for the dance performance, even though you know you're the better dancer. You got a lower mark than the kid next to you, who cheated. Your team lost because the referee missed an obvious call. Or the classic: you were asked to give your toy to a younger child, simply because he is younger. Likely, you didn't have the vocabulary for injustice yet. But you knew something was wrong, and that feeling of wrongness just didn't go away the way it was supposed to.
Most parents navigate these moments by reaching for a script: "Next time, work harder," "Life isn't always fair," or "I understand you feel this way." These things are all true. But they sting anyway, because they don't actually answer the question the child is really asking, which isn't "what should I do differently?" It's something closer to: why does the world work like this?
What Camus understood
Albert Camus argued that the central problem of human existence is what he called the absurd. It is the collision between our deep need for meaning, order, and justice, and the universe's complete indifference to that need. The universe doesn't care that you prepared. It doesn't care that you deserved it. Life just proceeds. This is not nihilism. Camus wasn't saying nothing matters. He was saying something more demanding: you have to look at the absurdity clearly, without flinching, and then choose to play anyway. Not because the game is fair, but because playing fully is the only response that preserves your dignity inside an unfair game.
"The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart." — Albert Camus
The game frame
What if we taught children, early, that the game of life is structurally unfair, but that learning to play an unfair game with full commitment is actually one of the most sophisticated things a human being can do? This isn't the lesson "don't care about the outcome." It's something harder and more honest: the outcome is partially outside your control, and your job is to play with full intensity anyway. Athletes know and do this. Artists know this. The best performers in any field have somehow internalised that they can't control results, only their own inputs. But that the quality of the input is the whole game. The ones who fall apart are usually the ones who were never told that the game was always going to be at least a little bit rigged, and so they take the unfairness personally, as if it means something about them. But it doesn't. It's just a game.
What this looks like in practice
When rejection happens (and it will happen), the goal isn't to rush past the pain or reframe it into a lesson before the child has had a chance to actually feel it. Camus doesn't ask Sisyphus to pretend the boulder is light. He just asks him to find something worth preserving in the act of pushing it. So the conversation isn't "here's why this is actually fine." It's: "yeah, that genuinely sucks, and it's unfair, and you're allowed to feel that. And when you're ready, the game continues. What do we do next?". I think that small shift from resolving the injustice to acknowledging it and moving through it is one of the most useful things you can model for a child. Not that life is fair or that it’s on them because they didn’t work hard enough. The reality is that hard work doesn’t always win. But, despite that, we can hold unfairness without being destroyed by it, and the next move or another chance is always available, even when the last one didn't go your way.
The lab experiment: If you are a parent, find a recent moment of injustice or rejection in your child's life, something still a little raw. Instead of resolving it, sit with them in it for a moment. Name it honestly: "Yeah, that's genuinely unfair." Don't rush to the lesson. Then, when the moment is right, ask: "So what do we do next?" See where they go.
And if you don't have children, think about the last time something unfair happened to you. Not a tragedy, just one of those small injustice that still has a little sting when you poke it. Notice whether you resolved it or just buried it. The Camus question applies to you too: can you hold the unfairness clearly, without pretending it wasn't real, and still ask yourself what comes next?
