Sisyphus was a wise and cunning man, whose crime is that he went against the ancient gods of Greece. Whether or not his actions are justified is another story, but in the end, he was prosecuted by those in power and judged through their laws. As punishment, he was tasked to push a huge rock towards the top of a hill.
The rock isn’t an ordinary object though, as we are talking about ancient gods here. The real punishment is that once he reaches the top, Sisyphus always loses his grip and the rock falls back down into the bottom. He then has to carry the rock towards the top, and the same thing happens over and over again for all eternity.
The absurdity of life
I was playing a video game called Ghost of Tsushima. This tells a historical fiction about an island in Japan during the Mongol invasion. Tsushima, due to its close proximity to the Mongol empire, was the first Japanese territory to be invaded. In this game, your character is a samurai bent on driving off the invaders from his home island. Through the story you interact with all types of characters, from mighty lords to commoners. One mission involved investigating the murder of a family. As I explored the area around their house, I noticed the various farming tools, garden, haystack, and mats full of dried fish. I cannot help but think at how hard this family worked to sustain their life.
Being a peasant in times past is absolutely not a walk in the park. You have to grow and harvest your own food. Dig a well or suffer dehydration. On top of that, you still have to pay your taxes to the owner of the land and sometimes suffer humiliation from people on a higher social standing than yours.
A tough and noble life, but up to what end? When you get raided by bandits while your family is asleep? When you lie in the floor in your own pool of blood, vulnerable and helpless?
You may not be a peasant in modern times, but you can definitely relate. Sometimes it just feels hard to continue on living. Working a job to exhaustion every single day. Waking up very early just so you will not be late for school. Taking care of a loved one that is terminally ill. It feels endless. Rather than having a stroll through the plains, life feels like pushing a rock uphill.
And to what end? People you care about will forget about you. The ones you love will eventually despise you. In the end, you will die. Then what is the point?
The Myth of Sisyphus
Albert Camus, a French philosopher, wrote about this problem in his 1942 philosophical essay called The Myth of Sisyphus. In his writing, Camus compares the absurdity of life to the story of Sisyphus. As humans, we try our best to live, hoping for a better future. But the only certainty in our future is that we will face challenges and difficulties. In addition to that, all of us are moving towards an inevitable end: death.
This may cause someone to just give up hope and choose suicide, but Camus argues against it. Instead of being depressed, he exhorts us to embrace the absurdity of life.
To embrace the absurd implies embracing all that the unreasonable world has to offer. Without meaning in life, there is no scale of values. “What counts is not the best living but the most living.”
Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
Stoic philosophy tells us to love our own fate. Amor Fati. We do not control everything that happens, but we can control how we respond to them. Trying to control everything is a futile endeavor, and the sooner we accept that fact, the better our lives will be. But we should not just accept it, one should learn how to appreciate our fate.
Happiness in absurdity
Camus takes it to another level when he said that not only does Sisyphus continue on his hard and pointless task, but that he is smiling while doing it.
The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
How is he able to smile in this situation? Sisyphus finds happiness in the accomplishment of the task he undertakes and not in the meaning of this task. Focusing on what is the meaning of what you are doing right now takes you away from the present. And if you are not in the present, you are either in the past, which cannot be changed or undone, or in the future, which cannot be determined.
The suffering you are enduring at the moment is increased unnecessarily by the suffering we inflict upon ourselves. Think about this when you say to yourself things like:
What did I do to deserve this?
Tomorrow, everything will ache again and I will be miserable.
Why did that person have to betray me?
Remember, we are only entitled to the labor, not the fruits of it.