You have already accepted the premise. Somewhere along the way the old certainties stopped holding — the plan, the script, the quiet sense that your life was going somewhere on its own — and you landed on the plain fact that nothing about it came with a meaning attached. What you are doing now is trying to decide which kind of person that makes you. An absurdist, or a nihilist. As if naming the condition were the same as knowing what to do about it.
Both words start in the same place. Nihilism is the view that life has no intrinsic meaning, value, or purpose — that no external source hands any of it down. Absurdism, the term most associated with Albert Camus, agrees that the universe offers no given meaning, but locates the problem in a specific collision: our need for meaning meeting a world that stays silent. In The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), Camus called that collision the absurd, and rejected the two easy exits from it — ending your life, and the "leap" into religious or philosophical certainty. He also rejected the nihilist label; a later book, The Rebel (1951), argues against nihilism directly. So the popular contrast runs roughly like this: the nihilist concludes that nothing matters and stops, and the absurdist concludes that nothing matters and keeps going anyway, in what Camus called revolt.
That contrast is real, and it is also where most of the conversation ends. Two attitudes toward the same fact, one heavy and one defiant, and you get to pick the one that suits your temperament. But look at what both of them actually are. They are stances. Positions held toward a situation. And a stance, however clear-eyed, does not by itself build anything.
This is the part the "vs." framing hides. The real alternative to nihilism was never absurdism, and the real alternative to absurdism was never nihilism. Held as moods, the two are closer to each other than either is to a life actually being lived. The alternative to both is the thing neither of them names: drift.
Drift is what happens to the meaning question when you stop answering it — not despair, not defiance, just the slow default. "Drift is not dramatic." It is a job you never quite chose but kept, a way of spending your days you never designed but inherited, a set of priorities that won every quiet contest simply by showing up while you were busy deciding what to call yourself. "Drift is passive acceptance repeated long enough to look like identity." You can be a committed nihilist, or a committed absurdist, or a committed nothing, and still be drifting the entire time — because none of those positions touches what you actually do on a Tuesday.
Here is the claim underneath all of it. Meaning is not discovered. "It is assigned." Not handed to you by the universe, and not settled once in your head, but built out of what you return to, protect, and give your hours to. Which means meaning is being assigned in your life right now, whether or not you have resolved your philosophy. Your calendar is assigning it. Your attention is assigning it. "So the issue is not whether meaning is being assigned. It is. The question is whether you are doing the assigning." The nihilist who has "given up" still gives their days to something. The absurdist in "revolt" still spends the afternoon somehow. The silence of the universe changes none of that. Something is always being built. The only variable is whether you chose it.
This is also where the absurdist's revolt quietly runs out. Revolt is a striking attitude and a poor instruction. It tells you to keep going, but not toward what, and over time it can harden into an identity — a certain heroic weariness, a fluency in talking about meaninglessness that becomes its own comfortable furniture. That is revolt as posture. The more useful move is smaller and harder: to turn away "from revolt as posture" and toward "construction as practice." Stop performing a relationship to the void, and start deciding, in behaviour, what gets your time. Camus supplied the honest starting point — "life has no given meaning, and that fact should be faced." He is much less help on the morning after.
None of this requires you to sneak meaning back in through a side door. You do not have to pretend the universe cares, or that your work is cosmically significant, or that there is a hidden reason underneath it all. The blank fact can stay exactly as blank as absurdism and nihilism both insist. What changes is where you look for the answer. Not up, at a silent sky, waiting for it to speak or confirming again that it won't — but down, at the ordinary week, where the assigning is already happening in your absence.
So the question you actually have is not which camp you belong to. It is smaller and more demanding than that. Given that nothing arrives pre-loaded with meaning, and given that your days are being spent on something regardless — what will you spend them on deliberately? Absurdism and nihilism are answers to a question about the universe. This is a question about your week, and it is the only one that ever changes anything.
Whether nothing matters is a question about the cosmos. What you did today is a question about you — and only one of them was ever going to build a life.
Nothing Matters. Now What? develops the case that meaning is assigned by what you repeatedly do — and that drift, not despair, is the real alternative.