Life & Wisdom Quote by Robert Sheckley

Absurdism, in Sheckley’s hands, isn’t a solemn philosophy lesson; it’s a membership card waved with a grin. Calling it a “French fad” deliberately cheapens what Camus and company treated as an existential reckoning, reducing high seriousness to something like a seasonal scarf you try on for the look. That’s the joke, but it’s also a defense mechanism: if the universe is meaningless, one response is to aestheticize the void and act like you chose it. “I’d like to belong to” turns dread into social aspiration, a sly admission that even our most hardcore skepticism is still haunted by a desire for community, style, and approval.

The line also plays with cultural prestige. “French” signals intellectual chic in the Anglophone imagination, the kind of imported sophistication that flatters the consumer. Sheckley, a science fiction writer who specialized in satirical thought experiments, knows how quickly ideas become commodities. He’s poking at the mid-century habit of treating philosophies as identity accessories: existentialism as a pose, nihilism as a brand, despair with better typography.

Contextually, it fits Sheckley’s broader project: exposing the absurdity of systems - bureaucracies, markets, alien societies - by treating them as normal and watching them collapse under their own logic. The subtext is almost tenderly cynical: yes, life is ridiculous; yes, we turn that into a club; and yes, the need to “belong” survives even the most ruthless confrontation with meaninglessness. That tension is why the line lands: it laughs at pretension while confessing to it.