Camus begins with suicide. Was he right to start there?
The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) opens by saying the fundamental philosophical question is whether life is worth living. Everything else, he says, comes afterwards.
The absurd, for Camus, isn't in us or in the world but in the confrontation between our demand for meaning and the world's silence. He rejects two escapes: physical suicide, and what he calls philosophical suicide, the leap into faith or system he sees in Kierkegaard, Chestov and Jaspers. What's left is revolt, freedom and passion, and the famous instruction to imagine Sisyphus happy.
Camus himself resisted the label "existentialist". But I wonder whether his starting point is too dramatic. Most people who ask what their life means aren't in crisis; they're tired, or bored, or curious. Does beginning with the extreme case distort the question?