Forcing meaningless acts on a person produces existential disgust and despair.

Evidence

However, such salvation is only possible if, despite obstacles and failures, a man preserves the disposal of his future, if the situation opens up more possibilities to him. In case his transcendence is cut off from his goal or there is no longer any hold on objects which might give it a valid content, his spontaneity is dissipated without founding anything. Then he may not justify his existence positively and he feels its contingency with wretched disgust. There is no more obnoxious way to punish a man than to force him to perform acts which make no sense to him, as when one empties and fills the same ditch indefinitely, when one makes soldiers who are being punished march up and down, or when one forces a schoolboy to copy lines. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, 28

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

• XREF: Thesis-directly relevant to the reader’s typology project: meaningless constraint explains why sub-men and serious men flee into fixed roles rather than risking the openness of true freedom.