In The Stranger, Albert Camus introduces us to a puzzling character who seems to be oddly (and almost inhumanely) indifferent to the world around him. This character, Meursault, is a frog. Or rather, he should’ve been a frog.

One of the most important traits that humans possess which separates us from other life forms is the ability to look to the future. We can hope, we can dream, and we can (occasionally) consider the future consequences of our actions. Humans will spend their entire lives trying to bring new innovations and ideas just for the betterment of the lives of the humans that come after. However, due to the terrifying uncertainty that one finds when they look into the deep dark unknown of the future, our obsession with tomorrow often causes us to spiral into a bizarre crisis of existence. Thus, our ability to look forward in time is both a blessing and a curse. It is what makes us both the greatest and most unreasonably anxious species on earth. It is human nature to be scared of the future, and thus it is just as natural to question and attempt to give reason to the unknown.

Love, family, friends, children, competition, achievement, money, these are all constructs that humans employ to attempt to give our lives meaning. Do these things actually have meaning? No, not really. However that doesn’t mean there is no purpose in them. Wars have killed billions of people, empires have risen and fallen, we’ve made buildings that touch the clouds, we’ve been to space, is none of that real? The concepts those things were built on might be made-up, but that doesn’t make the resulting innovation and progress any less real.

Existentialists believe that the only way to live an “authentic” life is to accept that the concepts which we use to justify our existence are pointless and that living under them is living under illusion. It’s hard to tell if Camus himself supports an existentialist point of view, but assuming he does, and assuming that Meursault is an existentialist character, I believe from the deepest part of my heart that Meursault (and perhaps Camus as well) would’ve been much better off had they been born as frogs.

Frogs, like most other animals, live completely in the moment. Just like Meursault, they go about their day, spending most of their time sitting and blinking as simple thoughts drift around in their teeny tiny frog brains. If you pick a frog up with your fingers pressed on it’s belly and back, and begin to squeeze, the frog will only try to wiggle out once it can no longer breathe. The implications of what might happen if it remains under the increasing pressure doesn’t matter until it becomes clear that death is imminent. It doesn’t fear death, because it can’t imagine death. It can’t imagine the future, it can’t think of the possible consequences of staying locked between two giant fingers pressing on either side of it’s body until those fingers are nearly touching.

Frogs never change their expressions, nothing in the world aside from food, sex, and death will ever cause them to take motivated action. They are, in the simplest way possible, alive. But they are not living.

Meursault upsets me, as I can’t imagine that anyone would ever consider his an authentic life, as if we should all follow his example. Meursault achieves nothing in The Stranger, his lack of imagination and fear of the future is borderline inhuman. To regret the past, to overlook and undervalue the present, to fear and imagine the future, nothing is more human. People like Meursault may see it as a fault, it may annoy him, but to lack these feelings on the past, present, and future is to me the most inhuman trait one could possibly have.

Existentialists may believe that they are above others, that they have somehow unlocked the proper way to live, but at the end of the day they too are just trying to cope and comprehend the incomprehensible. Frogs are the true existentialists, as they truly could not care less about why they’re alive or where they’ll be a week from now. They just go around sitting in mossy ponds and dirty gutter puddles with their black beady eyes looking for the next way to have babies or eat the nearest thing that can fit in their mouths, whichever comes first.

That sounds like a fitting life for Meursault, I think he’d find himself much happier in a society where he can exist without questioning, one where nothing more than remaining alive is expected of him, and one where the only purpose he needed to acknowledge was to live and die (probably in the mouth of a bigger, more bumpy frog).