The cardboard box arrived with the physical density of a collapsed star.

According to the website, this object was called “LÅNGFJÄLL,” or perhaps “GRÖNBLÖR,” or some other Nordic throat injury. The product photos showed a calm Scandinavian living room containing one minimalist oak wardrobe, one folded beige blanket, and absolutely no signs that a human being had ever screamed inside the apartment.

I dragged it into my hallway with the strained posture of a medieval peasant transporting plague victims. The package weighed approximately the same as a morally complicated horse. By the time I got it, I had already entered the first psychological stage of furniture assembly: denial.

"This won’t be so bad."

This is the most dangerous thought a human being can have.

I opened the box. Inside were:

There is also a tiny, faceless Scandinavian stick figure silently suffering in geometric silence. One little man smiles while holding an Allen key. Another appears to be warning me against attaching Panel B to Socket F unless I wish to bring shame upon my bloodline.

I sat cross-legged on the floor, staring at the diagrams, and then came the sentence every person says before losing six hours of their life:

"I’ll just quickly build this."

Camus argued that human existence is fundamentally irrational. We desperately search for meaning, order, and coherence in a universe that continuously responds with silence, confusion, and administrative paperwork.

This is precisely the IKEA experience. The instruction manual presents itself as rational. Logical. Sequential. But halfway through construction, reality fractures. Suddenly, you are holding two visually identical screws that apparently possess profoundly different metaphysical purposes.

One is Screw 7B.

The other is Screw 7C.

If you accidentally confuse them, the wardrobe collapses into a Scandinavian coffin.

Camus wrote that the absurd emerges from the confrontation between the human need for clarity and the world's unreasonable silence. The IKEA manual does not explain. The tiny instruction man never says: "You inserted the dowel backward because you are exhausted and spiritually deteriorating."

No. He simply smiles eternally while your furniture slowly becomes structurally theoretical.

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The most psychologically manipulative aspect of furniture assembly is that the beginning always feels manageable.

Step 1:
Attach a wooden peg.

Fine.

Step 2:
Insert Screw B.

Easy.

You become arrogant.

You begin imagining yourself as an engineer. A builder. A practical adult with spatial reasoning.

Then Step 14 arrives like a military ambush.

Suddenly, the manual demands that you rotate the structure vertically while simultaneously stabilizing three floating panels and “gently” inserting a locking mechanism using “moderate pressure.”

Moderate pressure, according to whom? At this stage, the wardrobe no longer resembles furniture. It resembles a failed agricultural machine discovered in a flooded barn.

And yet the tiny instruction man continues smiling. His expression contains the calm emotional neutrality of a doctor announcing an incurable disease.

If human beings attempt to impose meaning and order onto lifeless wooden panels, the cat understands Camus far better than we do. Camus argued that the absurd emerges from the conflict between our desperate need for structure and the universe’s complete indifference to whether the bookshelf stands upright.

The cat has already accepted this. The moment I laid the first plank on the floor, she arrived at the scene. Not to help, obviously. To interfere at levels previously only achieved by government bureaucracy.

She sat directly on top of the instruction booklet, the precise second I needed to look at it, which meant every five minutes I had to gently slide a six-kilogram loaf of offended meat off a diagram explaining whether Screw 7B was meant to spiritually align with Wooden Peg C.

And this, I realised, is the true absurd condition. Trying to achieve clarity while a cat slowly lowers herself onto the only page that explains Step 14.

Then came the biting. Not aggressive biting. Worse. Experimental biting. The kind of soft, deeply annoying chewing that communicates: "I am testing whether your ankle is structurally necessary."

Camus believed that human suffering comes from expecting the world to cooperate with our plans. The cat, meanwhile, has never once expected coherence from the universe. This is why she is psychologically invincible. To her, the half-built wardrobe did not represent failure, labour, or existential struggle.

It represented:

At one point, she disappeared completely, and for ten glorious minutes, I thought she had lost interest.

No.

She had simply gone to empty her intestines with the detached serenity of a philosopher who understands that all human attempts at control are temporary illusions.

When I finally finished, I noticed one small issue. The left door hangs slightly lower than the right. Not dramatically, but just enough to suggest that the wardrobe has witnessed unspeakable horrors.

At first, this devastated me. I considered disassembling the entire thing and starting over. But then I thought of Camus. The absurd hero, according to Camus, is not someone who conquers meaninglessness. It is someone who continues anyway. Someone who accepts the chaos, the repetition, the incompleteness. Someone who looks directly at the crooked wardrobe door and says: "Fine. Lean, then."

And honestly, the imperfection comforts me now. A perfectly assembled wardrobe would imply the existence of a coherent universe. This one looks exactly like a human being built it while slowly losing psychological stability on the living room floor.

Which means it is finally real.

See you next time. Keep the extra screws,

Asena

RABBIT HOLE

Every week, I fall down a few rabbit holes. I gather here some insightful things (I don’t promise) I have read, watched, and discovered over the last seven days. If you’re looking for a bit of wonder, click the links below to explore more.

I sat down to watch Carla Simón’s Summer 1993 (Estiu 1993), fully expecting one of those breezy European indie films where people eat figs in the sun, ride vintage bicycles, and stare thoughtfully at a clothesline for twenty minutes. Instead, I got a front-row seat to the sheer, unadulterated terrorism of a six-year-old’s emotional landscape.

The setup is simple: It’s 1993, and young Frida, newly orphaned, is shipped from Barcelona to the Catalan countryside to live with her aunt, uncle, and their three-year-old daughter.

But where the film absolutely shines is in its refusal to buy into Hollywood’s version of childhood grief. You know the trope: the angelic, tear-streaked cherub who looks up at the night sky and whispers profoundly to a star. Summer 1993 knows the dark truth: grieving children are essentially tiny, emotionally unstable mafia dons.

Frida manages her pain by going full sociopath. We’re talking next-level, calculated manipulation. She casually tricks her toddler cousin into wandering off into the deep, dark woods like it's a perfectly reasonable Tuesday activity. Later, she forces the three-year-old to play "indentured servant" while Frida lounges in her late mother's oversized sunglasses and smeared lipstick, sighing, "Mummy is too tired to play with you, darling."

It’s a spectacular reminder that kids aren't pure vessels of innocence; they are complex, messy little agents of chaos trying to figure out why the adults are whispering so much. This film validates that sometimes, the absolute most honest, rational response to a confusing universe is to aggressively drop a cabbage on the floor or stare down a farm animal until it feels as deeply uncomfortable as you do.

I saw this painting by Jean Honoré Fragonard and Marguerite Gérard, and it perfectly shows the timeless truth that no matter how much wealth or exquisite fashion you possess, your pet will inevitably steal the spotlight by acting like an absolute weirdo.

At first glance, it’s everything you’d expect from the refined world of late eighteenth-century France. You have a young woman standing firmly in the center, dressed in a luminous robe à l’Anglaise. Her pale gown glows softly against the dark interior, and she holds her fan with the calm, theatrical grace of someone who has absolutely nothing to do all day.

Sitting atop a beautifully intricate carpet spread across the table, this cat seems to be having a deeply contemplative moment. A black cloth has just been lifted off a shiny silver globe, and the cat appears absolutely convinced that a fierce, similar rival has invaded its space. One paw is raised in alert. The whole scene captures a dramatic, almost theatrical moment in which a creature's mind is momentarily overwhelmed by a simple optical illusion.

It turns out that even centuries ago, before smartphones and social media, humans still spent an embarrassing amount of their free time gathering around just to watch a cat thoroughly embarrass itself.

That’s it. You’ve now officially reached the bottom. Thank you for reading. ❤️ Your reward this week is this optical illusion of a very patient boy, representing the perfect evolutionary bridge between a classic Dalmatian and landscaping gravel.

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