“One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” – Albert Camus
Recently, I went back to The Myth of Sisyphus, the book I never really fully understood when I first read it as an adolescent.
This time i went down the rabbit hole and came back with something completely different.
Sisyphus’ story isn’t about endure the hardship life throws at you and “stay positive”, nor it is about “finding joy in hardship”.
It revolves around a far more brutal question:
What keeps a man going when the illusion is gone?
In the original myth, the gods don’t just punish Sisyphus with endless labor, they punish him with lucidity.
- He knows the rock will fall
- He knows there is no pay off
- There is no higher meaning coming to rescue
This is suffering after understanding – not suffering caused by ignorance.
The understanding that life itself has no intrinsic meaning.
It is like a never ending fractal – no matter how deep you go, there is always another layer. If you are waiting for the ultimate meaning to come, you will wait forever.
We all will die. At some point, you wake up to the reality that society is a man-made concept. Your partner probably only loves you partly for what you provide – there’s no such unconditional love. And all the sensational enjoyment is merely a combination of biochemical releases in the brain, as is pain.
So what’s left to pursue? What’s motivating you to keep working, striving, pretending there will be a meaning behind everything?
And here Albert Camus gives the answer.
He doesn’t say “Stay positive” or “Be happy anyway”. It’s something much stronger: the refusal to surrender one’s inner sovereignty. And that’s why:
“The struggle itself is enough to fill a man’s heart.” – Albert Camus
When there is nothing else granted in life, there’s no such external meaning worth pursuing, one’s most important responsibility is to create his own meaning, live by it, and stick to it even when knowing it leads to nowhere.
Sisyphus is happy not because he has a belief, but because he doesn’t lie to himself.
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