In the early ’80s, I read No Exit and The Stranger back-to-back, sitting cross-legged on my bedroom floor, somewhere between Atari and Armageddon. Back then, they felt like philosophical curios. European fever dreams written by chain-smoking men in wool coats, muttering about nothingness and moral nausea. I didn’t know they were field manuals for the American future.

Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, reluctant comrades in the war against meaninglessness, penned two of the 20th century’s most enduring existential works. No Exit, Sartre’s claustrophobic portrait of three damned souls trapped in a parlor-shaped hell, strips away the notion of external torture. “Hell is other people,” Sartre tells us, and in 2025 America, that hits less like a metaphor and more like a customer service interaction.

Camus’s The Stranger offers a colder, lonelier torment. Meursault, its emotionally opaque protagonist, kills a man for no reason and is condemned less for his crime than his refusal to perform grief. He is executed not for what he did, but for failing to play the role society demanded.

Pair these works and you begin to see it: America is both the room with no exit and the beach with no meaning.

I. Surveillance as Damnation: The Sartrean Room Goes Digital

No Exit is set in a room with no mirrors, no windows, and no sleep. The characters are condemned to observe themselves through the eyes of others, endlessly. Now swap velvet furniture for smartphone screens and hell for Twitter. Welcome to the surveillance state of the self.

In America today, identity is forged not through introspection, but through projection. Our personas, curated, filtered, and branded exist in a panopticon of mutual scrutiny. Like Garcin, we beg for validation; like Estelle, we deny our guilt; like Inez, we feast on the weaknesses of others to distract from our own damnation. Sartre’s hell is here, but it got a UX upgrade.

We live in the eternal gaze of each other’s curated judgment. There is no exit. Only comments.

II. The Absurd Man in the Algorithmic Age

Camus’s Meursault is a cipher. He neither lies nor postures. He refuses to pretend and for that, he is destroyed. American society now mirrors this exact inversion of justice, where authenticity is punished, and performance is prized.

We have developed a pathological need for emotional display. Grief must be visible, outrage must be public, identity must be declared in sanctioned hashtags. Failure to participate in stoic silence, ambiguous humor and the wrong kind of sorrow is viewed not as neutrality but as guilt.

In the court of public opinion, Meursault would be cancelled long before the sentencing phase.

But the deeper crime is metaphysical. Like Camus’s sun-drenched executioner, our institutions persist in absurd rituals. Mass shootings are met with thoughts and prayers. Corruption is handled with performative hearings. Climate collapse is debated like it’s a brand strategy. We do not address reality. We narrate around it.

III. Condemned to Be Free, Terrified to Be Responsible

Sartre believed we are condemned to be free. That without a divine author scripting our moves, we are forced to choose, to act, and to take responsibility. But in America, freedom has become a euphemism for escapism. Responsibility is for suckers, and accountability is always someone else’s problem.

Whether its billionaires cosplaying as prophets, politicians punting crises down the line, or citizens refusing the bare minimum for collective survival, we’ve taken freedom and amputated its consequence. This isn’t liberty, it’s a tantrum in philosophical drag.

Meanwhile, the room gets smaller. The sun gets hotter. The trial resumes.

IV. Toward a New Ethics: Reckoning Without Rescue

Both Sartre and Camus rejected nihilism, despite the assumption that existentialism leads there. They proposed, in different keys, that meaning must be constructed and not inherited. We don’t get a manual. We get a mirror.

The mirror now is cracked but not broken. Perhaps America can learn to stare into it without flinching. Perhaps we can build a culture that tolerates ambiguity, rewards integrity over optics and stops mistaking visibility for virtue.

Or perhaps we stay in the room, refreshing the feed, waiting for the beach to cool.

There is no exit.
There is no stranger.
There is only us.

And the question: What now?