[jordanpg]

Before reading The Stranger, I was headlong into the then-popular "New Atheism" movement, which came with a certain air of superiority of brainpower over the naive masses. But reading The Stranger had a profound impact on me, even before I knew anything more formal about existentialist philosophy.

It was an awakening: I began to understand that the problem with the world isn't that everyone needs to learn more physics and think more like me. The problem is that none of this stuff -- life -- really means anything; that's a hard pill for lots of people to swallow (understandably); and our stupid little lives are just 80 years or so of farting around and trying to forget about what is obvious (h/t to KV).

The book ultimately softened my overly critical views about religion and superstition and helped me mature into someone much more sympathetic to the various weird things that people think and do.