It’s an absurd world we live in.

It’s full of conflicting ideologies, policies, ad campaigns and political campaigns, all of which cycle endlessly through the public consciousness and attempt to invoke a single vague and ill-defined concept known as “The American Dream.”

Amid all this madness, how can anyone make sense of anything, much less figure out just what the “American Dream” really is?

It’s a difficult task, to be sure — to make sense of the barrage of messages, images, sound bytes and logos that flash by us every second of every day. But a journalist’s job is to understand all of it and relate that understanding to a greater audience.

As a writer still new to this trade, I sometimes wonder if completing such a task is possible and if the method journalists use today — objectivity at all costs — is really the best way to understand and disseminate the workings of the world.

I’m not so sure. In the past half decade or so that I’ve been a conscientious analyst of media and the craft of writing, I’ve found many journalists and writers to pattern my work after — Bob Woodward and Thomas Friedman, Alex Haley and Ernest Hemingway, to name a few — but none have influenced my writing so much as one reclusive, left-wing, gun-slinging outlaw journalist from Aspen, Colo. — Hunter S. Thompson.

Thompson, the author of “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” “Hell’s Angels,” several other books and scores of political and social essays, seemed to understand the absurdity of the world. His work was deeply personal, focusing as much on his own drug-induced paranoia as on whatever madness surrounded him — which through his 40-year career ranged from off-road motorcycle races to presidential races. In these personal reflections, he made sense of the events he witnessed, often exposing them for the frauds or follies that they were.

In the early 1970s, he assigned himself the task of “investigating the death of the American Dream,” a decades-long project in which he examined the culture that surrounded him — the culture that produced the Vietnam War and Watergate — and tried to determine where it had gone wrong. All he found was absurdity, and by focusing on that through his own skewed lens, he was able to strip it all away and show the truth that lay beneath.

In recent years, Thompson was acerbic as ever, writing in a 2003 column for ESPN.com, “We are truly the squanderers of what was once the American Dream …” He attacked President Bush, whom he called a “Waterhead son of Texas” who “has taken this country from a prosperous nation at peace to a dead-broke nation at War.”

Perhaps believing the Dream was finally dead, Thompson killed himself in his Aspen home Sunday. He was 67.

The more I read his works, the more he fascinates me, and the more I model my own work after him. I’ve written about two dozen opinion columns for the Daily, and of them, the ones that have the most obvious Thompson influence are my favorites, and have generated the most reader feedback.

I referenced him as recently as Friday — in a column that emulated his outrageous “gonzo” style by embellishing my own experiences to create the persona of a Marxist kleptomaniac. In an autobiographical essay for an internship last spring, I said my career aspirations were to become the “journalistic synthesis of Bob Dylan and Hunter S. Thompson.”

I wonder what made him kill himself. Was it today’s politics and a belief that the absurdity he spent his life exposing had finally become too much to handle? Was the next step in his investigation of the death of the American Dream to examine death firsthand?

Regardless, he lived his life and wrote his stories on his own terms and that, to me, is the essence of the American Dream.