Existentialism

Bound For Death Every person in the world has one thing in common and that one thing is death. Not many people want to face the fact that everyone will die at a certain point in time until that time is brought among them. Existentialism is the theory of being a living human individual and that ultimately life is meaningless because the world keeps moving on when death occurs. This theory is prevalent in the novel The Stranger by Albert Camus and the film Office Space by Mike Judge. In The Stranger a shipping clerk named Mersault lives his life without caring about societal standards and he believes that having faith in a higher god is a waste of his time. In Office Space a man named Peter Gibbons is programmer at a software company called Initech, he is fed up with a job and the lifestyle that he is living in. Although the characters in The Stranger and Office Space inflict with different plots and people, they share the same indifference to the world, choose their own path, and accept the consequences of their decisions. Emotion and compassion are two main actions that are supposed to be expressed when a person dies. In The Stranger, Mersault’s mother passes away and so he takes a bus to the funeral home where his mother’s body is. At the funeral he did not cry or even get upset over the passing of his mother, almost like he didn’t care about her. A similar situation occurs in Office Space, Peter is at a hypnotherapist’s office receiving treatment from the doctor, all of sudden the doctor has a heart attack and all Peter does is watch the surrounding people try to help the doctor. These two situations show the same indifference for the world by not caring or showing emotion towards someone that is in danger or passed away. Peter and Mersault having no emotion in those types of situations are contradictory to the societal standard. The people around Peter and Mersault at the time of the incidents criticize their actions of