When Our Ache Has No Name
By Radhule Weininger, M.D., Ph.D.
In Albert Camus' 1947 novel The Plague, a sickness descends on the Algerian city of Oran. The gates are shut. No one can leave and no one can explain why it came.
Camus wasn't really writing about a plague. He was writing about the human condition as he saw it: A universe that offers no built-in meaning, no reassuring order, no home. He called this the absurd – the collision between our hunger for significance and belonging and a world that answers with silence and coldness. Nearly 80 years later, the book reads far less like fiction and more like a description of how many of us quietly feel.
I first read The Plague when I was 13 years old. I recall being deeply moved because it described the existential void we were then experiencing in post-World War II Germany. There was a hunger for meaning to fill our sense of emptiness amid the destruction. A similar sense of void, confusion, and meaninglessness now lingers in the air.
Camus opens the novel by describing Oran as a place of commerce and habit where people work hard "for the sole purpose of getting rich," love mechanically, and die almost without noticing. This town in northern Africa during the early 20th century was like every other town in America or Europe.
Then something unthinkable happens: An epidemic breaks out. When the plague seals the gates, separation occurs in harsh ways. Lovers are torn apart mid-sentence. Everyone longs for a reunion that grows increasingly impossible to achieve. The residents of Oran become homesick for a life that technically still belongs to them yet is suddenly beyond their reach.
Camus called this separation, not death from disease, the deepest suffering the plague inflicted. He saw it clearly: Separation and loneliness had long preceded the disease. Routine had simply hidden them. This is true for us now, as well: Separation tears many immigrant families apart, and there is an epidemic of loneliness for the rest of us.
The Spiritual Homesickness Epidemic
There is a particular loneliness no amount of success can hide. You can meet every standard the world sets, including those for career, relationships, and a comfortable life and still wake up at 3 a.m. with a vague, persistent feeling of dread that something essential is missing. I call this spiritual homesickness.
It is not a symptom of failure. It is the soul's recognition that we have become separated from our true home, the sacred ground of being itself. Like homesickness for a beloved place, it holds both the pain of separation and the longing to return.
We are living through an epidemic of it. Millions of people feel profoundly alone despite constant digital connection, empty despite outward achievement, anxious despite unprecedented comfort. There's even an achievement paradox at work: The more faithfully we satisfy society's expectations, the more disconnected we tend to feel. About half of the population can barely make ends meet. Many live in constant fear of violent expulsion.
Numbness and Unfulfilled Longing
Camus writes about how the citizens of Oran quickly grow accustomed to catastrophe, folding even a plague into the rhythm of habit. We do the same, numbing the ache with busyness, screens, and the quiet assumption that this must be all there is. What makes our time distinctive is not that human beings suffer (they always have), but that so many suffer without a home to be sick for, or a deeper meaning to long for.
The traditions, communities, and shared cosmologies that once located us within a larger order have largely fallen away. Camus' shut-in citizens are us: exiled within our own lives, hurting, and unsure whether we were ever meant to belong anywhere at all.
Resting in Loving Awareness
In The Plague, Camus stubbornly refuses to succumb to despair. His hero, Dr. Rieux, continues to tend to the sick with no hope of victory or promise of reward out of what he calls "common decency." In a meaningless universe, Camus offers solidarity and love as an antidote. When we cannot know why we suffer, we can still refuse to let each other suffer alone.
Camus’ take is genuinely beautiful and, I think, a bit incomplete. He intuited that love and care are the deepest human responses to the absurd, but he could ground them only in defiance. What contemplative traditions add is the possibility that refuge was never truly gone, we simply forgot how to notice it.
Here is what matters. Beneath our racing thoughts, the very awareness in which every experience arises is not cold or neutral. It already holds warmth, care, and love. We don't have to manufacture or earn these qualities; we only need to notice what is already present.
Resting in this field of loving awareness, even for a few breaths, we touch something inexhaustible. It is not a personal reserve that burns out, but a ground that holds us. This is why care rooted here doesn't collapse into exhaustion. Dr. Rieux gives until he is hollow and burned out. The deeper invitation is to serve from abundance rather than end in depletion.
If we connect deeply with the ground of being, our sense of isolation begins to soften. As we gradually loosen our grip on the rigid, defended, separate self and ask honestly who exactly is anxious, who is lonely, we find that the walled-off "I" is more like a wave than a barricade – fully itself yet made entirely of the ocean. Losing that rigidity doesn't diminish us. It frees us into genuine belonging and interconnectedness.
Perhaps the most radical way forward is the realization that the ache itself is not a wound to be cured. It is a compass. Camus’ longing for meaning and the homesickness that wakes us at 3 a.m. are not evidence that we are broken. These are elements of the sacred, calling us home. When we stop running from the longing and simply rest within it, it reveals itself as wisdom and love.
Camus was right that the world will not spoon-feed us meaning and that love and solidarity are the answer. He just stopped one step short of the good news: What we've been longing for has never actually left us.
