Down below the murky water, in the muddy riverbed, the mayfly nymph quietly matures. When the winged mayfly emerges from the water on a summer’s day, it has only 24 hours to find a mate and reproduce before it dies. The mayfly’s feverish existence, although important from its own perspective, seems pointless from ours. A glass sponge, on the other hand, may live up to 11,000 years on the seabed.1 From that perspective, human life too seems absurd.Irrespective of an organism’s lifespan, all life will eventually cease to exist as the universe uses up its energy reserves and grows ever colder. Seen in this light, nothing we do now will matter in a million years. In the words of Leo Tolstoy, our lives seem like ‘some kind of stupid and evil practical joke’.2If nothing we do now will matter in a million years, does that make human life with its focus on achieving trivial goals, such as getting one’s hair done, absurd?In his article The Absurd (1971), American philosopher Thomas Nagel argues neither our pitifully short and fevered existence, nor our physical smallness relative to the universe, in itself, makes life absurd. There need not be an ultimate purpose to life for any of the activities within it to have meaning; all that is required is that it matters to us at the time. In Yemen today, there are children caught up in war, and their suffering matters to them, to their families, and to us. It is wrong to suggest that their suffering is insignificant because in a million years it makes no difference whether they were in pain. According to Nagel, the realisation of absurdity begins in those moments when we step back and consider our present activities sub specie aeternitatis (under the aspect of eternity). From this cosmic perspective, a faint suspicion that our lives are perhaps meaningless gains legitimacy. One may attempt to restore meaning with appeal to something larger, perhaps through belief in an afterlife. However, if our finite earthly existence itself is meaningless, then it remains meaningless even if it continues to exist for an eternity in heaven.Having gained a faint suspicion that our existence is futile, we nevertheless relegate the thought to the back of our minds and continue to take our lives seriously. For Nagel it is this aspect, those moments of awareness of our futility, yet our dismissal of it as we pursue trivial goals, that makes life absurd. If a mayfly could transcend its bodily existence and acquire the ability to perceive itself from outside, it too would come to see that its life is absurd, yet it would immediately return to its frantic routine, full of doubts that it was unable to resolve, but at the same time full of vigour that it was unable to abandon.3What can the mayfly do? Nagel does not believe that the absurdity of life should cause distress. The mayfly can simply acknowledge the absurdity of its life while not taking it overly seriously. And so can humans. After all, if nothing really matters, then the fact that life itself is absurd does not matter either.