We like to think we are creatures of reason, that we move through life guided by logic, clarity, and some basic agreement about what is real. But that’s not quite how it goes, is it?
We also live among fog, performance, half-truths, inflated language, and the strange talent people have for saying a lot while meaning very little.
Erasmus wrote In Praise of Folly to expose the vanity and hypocrisy of supposedly serious people and institutions. In other words, one of the old ways of telling the truth was to hand the microphone to folly and let it talk.
In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus gave us the absurd born from the clash between our hunger for order and a world that does not promise it. We want coherence. Instead, the world hands us silence, indifference, and contradiction.
Humans are pattern-seeking creatures. We search for order. We connect dots. We explain. We over-explain. We force meaning onto things that may have none.
But nonsense can also be playful, imaginative, even delightful. The kind that belongs in poems, in childhood, in art, in dreams. The kind that surprises us and reminds us life is not a machine.
That’s not the nonsense that wears me down. The nonsense that exhausts me is the kind that empties out meaning. The kind that bends things out of shape and still expects respect.
Nonsense leaves you standing there with that familiar feeling, the one that starts in the body before the mind catches up. A tightening. A pause. And a quiet inner question: did that really just happen?
One of the hardest things to swallow is that nonsense often arrives with confidence. It takes up space. It speaks in full sentences. It may even sound polished. And for a moment, if you are tired enough, you may wonder whether the problem is you.
It’s not. Some things are confusing because they make no sense at all. Like this post. Did you make it this far wondering how to make sense of nonsense?
My advice is simple, don’t!