The Absurd Body: Camus, Health Anxiety, and Meaning-Making in Modern Health Culture
In an era of advanced diagnostics, algorithmic medicine, and unprecedented access to health information, we might assume that individuals feel more secure in their bodies. Yet, paradoxically, we are witnessing an epidemic of uncertainty: rising rates of health anxiety, chronic illness, and compulsive self-diagnosis suggest a deeper existential unrest beneath the surface of our so-called awareness.
Every sensation - a skipped heartbeat, a moment of fatigue - is a potential threat. A symptom becomes a spiral. And in our increasingly connected world, tools meant to empower have become portals for obsession. Health anxiety and the widespread cultural practice of self-diagnosing reflect more than mental distress. They reveal an urgent hunger for meaning in a system and society that often withholds it.
Here, the existential philosophy of Albert Camus offers an unlikely but compelling lens.
Camus’ concept of the absurd—the dissonance between the human desire for clarity and the world’s refusal to deliver it - is not limited to philosophy. It is viscerally embodied. The body, as nurses and clinicians know, is not merely a physical organism but a deeply symbolic and psychological space. When we face ambiguous symptoms, unpredictable chronic flares, or the limitations of medical language, we face the absurd in real time.
From this perspective, our modern obsession with mental health and wellness becomes more than a clinical issue. It is existential. In the search for identity, safety, and understanding, individuals increasingly anchor themselves to diagnoses. Social media algorithms reward this behavior, validating experiences while often flattening their nuance. We have, in some ways, begun to treat discomfort as inherently pathological and uncertainty as intolerable.
But Camus offers a radical reframe: we do not need to resolve the absurd to live well within it.
In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus imagines Sisyphus - condemned to push a boulder uphill for eternity - as ultimately content. Not because the struggle disappears, but because he embraces it with awareness. He chooses presence over nihilism. In the same spirit, we can imagine a healthcare paradigm- especially within nursing and integrative health—that makes room for ambiguity, refrains from over-pathologizing the human condition, and empowers people to coexist with uncertainty or take control and pursue their health, rebelliously.
From my perspective as a Doctor of Nursing Practice with a focus on integrative health, this is not a call to ignore suffering or dismiss diagnoses. Rather, it’s a call to hold space for both evidence-based care and existential truth: that health is not the absence of symptoms, but the presence of meaning, connection, and agency.
Despite rising comorbidities, systemic failures, and a culture of constant comparison, we can still choose joy. We can still practice compassion- toward ourselves and others- without needing every emotion to fit within a diagnostic framework. We can live fully, even when the terrain of our minds or bodies is uncertain.
Wellness, in this context, becomes a form of philosophical resilience:
the capacity to face uncertainty without collapsing into fear,
to honor the body without obsessing over it,
and to care for ourselves without reducing our identities to what is broken.
As clinicians, we have the opportunity - and responsibility - to reimagine wellness not as perfection or predictability, but as a courageous act of presence. Camus reminds us that the absurd is not a flaw in the human experience - it is the experience.
