The Capture of Sisyphus
Happiness through fighting bad circumstances, not accepting them obediently
“Sisyphus,” 1548 by Titian
“The Capture of Sisyphus” is an essay I wrote on February 7th, 2023 after finishing Albert Camus’ “The Myth of Sisyphus.” I originally wanted to send this essay to my college newspaper but kept it to myself. What you see now is an edited and expanded version of that essay. (As a side note, I promise that every Camusgaard post will not be this hoity-toity or intellectual. I will outline my future plans in another post.)
I don’t fully agree with Camus, who I expand on in my essay, yet I do think his position deserves serious thought. To that end, I’ve tried to make my argument as clear as possible even to people who haven’t read “The Myth of Sisyphus.” And I’ll admit on some level I’m just being gloomy and splitting hairs in pop culture here. (“No! You guys aren’t reading Camus correctly, you aren’t suffering enough!”) Anyways, enjoy!
TL;DR - Sisyphus being happy is hard earned, not inevitable, and we shouldn’t take his toil for granted. By doing so, we cheapen Sisyphus’ happiness and the philosophy that sets him free from giving meaning to eternal and pointless tasks (unlike work and school). It takes a lot of integrity and personal struggle to infinitely complete a futile task and end up happy.
The Capture of Sisyphus
Which would be the crueler fate: being condemned to eternally roll a boulder up a mountain, or being misunderstood and also eternally rolling a boulder up a mountain? For the answer, we must look to Sisyphus and popular culture. As I consider how some people understand everyone’s favorite rock-roller, whether as a sigma with a disciplined grindset, an inspiration to students, or a blissful and lumbering oaf, I can’t help but feel like Sisyphus and his namesake myth have been captured, commodified, and collapsed in meaning.
In his 1940 essay “The Myth of Sisyphus,” Camus describes Sisyphus as an example of absurdist philosophy. In a nutshell, Camus’ absurdism posits that life is meaningless despite our human desire for coherence, structure, and narrative. Combining this with the proposition that inherent limitations in human reason prevent us from understanding the universe, Camus argues that it is hopeless and futile to search for meaning in the world. These two characteristics - human desire for coherence and the universe’s irrational indifference - are forever opposed and cannot be reconciled. And just like we’ll never find meaning in life despite repetitive effort, Sisyphus is condemned by the gods to forever roll a boulder up a mountain. Everywhere we look for answers, we find none, and once at the summit, despite all of Sisyphus’ effort and staggered movements, his stone merely rolls back to the bottom.
Camus’ argument is without a doubt bleak on its face. Life is hopeless? How does that help the existential dread that, I would argue, has reached many of us in 2023? Well, here’s the counterintuitive and famous twist: “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” Despite his torture, Sisyphus’ heart is filled by the journey up the mountain and the liberation of accepting and determining his own fate. Life is hopeless, yes, but recall that the point of the Sisyphus story is the internal strength of the man himself. In bravely embracing life’s absurdity, Sisyphus cuts out the anxiety of finding meaning and creates his own earthly fate (losing the stress of what it means to appease angry gods or fulfill our “destinies” in the process).
Camus’ “The Myth of Sisyphus” offers a liberating ideology against an oppressive world. Yes, life “is what it is,” but don’t bow to its indifference. Fight life's futility, even if it's hard to do so! Sisyphus’ ugly struggle never makes it into the simple conclusion sold about him, however: “Hey, if Sisyphus is happy, I can and necessarily will be happy too.” Yet without a careful eye to what defines absurd situations, I worry that this bite-sized summary of Sisyphus can be used to promote the status quo. Sisyphus’ happiness shouldn’t be an encouragement for us to persist in awful but changeable circumstances such as school or work. Writing essays, returning phone calls, and submitting applications have a logic to them, unlike our universe. Not only is there an end result and goal behind every menial professional and academic task we complete (e.g., earning money and degrees or bettering ourselves), but we also have the choice to change our work for something we like better.1 On the other hand, we can never substitute life's meaninglessness.2 Navigating the torment of work can be reasoned with, Sisyphus would grunt, stuck to his boulder, summiting the mountain for the gazillionth time and descending it for the gazillonth and first.
By accepting Sisyphus’ happiness without the thought process that got us there, we avoid the problem of our dread and melancholy, leaving our own proverbial boulders untouched at the “bottom of the mountain.” Sisyphus is not a hero of grinding in the workplace, or meeting academic deadlines, and shouldn’t be captured as such. Sisyphus fights much greater existential challenges. As we consider Sisyphus, we must be careful not to turn a story of hard-fought liberation into an advertisement for being happy and letting our meaningless, status quo lives wash over us. In every case where we avoid the hard realities Sisyphus raises (i.e., realities that lie beyond our careers3) while sharing in his happiness, we aren’t joining him towards the top of the mountain. Instead, we are letting the boulder win by checking out from the irrational life it represents.
We live in an age that is special for acknowledging that life apparently has no answer. Pre-modernists had gods to give them meaning, modernists found comfort in the supposed exhaustiveness of science, and in our postmodern era we have nothing and doubt everything. Our grasp on what to do with life has never been looser. In a moment of clarity that feels rare for our age, Albert Camus has offered we accept the meaninglessness of it all and to stick it to the universe by making the best out of the time we have (“Yeah, it’ll roll back down, but roll the rock anyway, dude”). And making the best out of the time we have will be hard: Sisyphus’ labor against the boulder requires every fiber of his integrity and being to accomplish.4 Yes, one must imagine Sisyphus happy, but only because he again and again makes the hard decision to fight life’s meaninglessness.
Some people may feel this reading of Camus and Sisyphus is ignorant to realities of capitalism and institutional legacies of oppression (note again that I originally wanted to pitch this essay to my college newspaper). How could we ever escape capitalism, what privileges are required to move from one job to another within it, and how feasibly could any one person bear the cost if they wanted to completely change their life? These are fair questions, but I don’t address them here because my goal was to criticize popular mis/understandings of Sisyphus based on what Camus himself wrote. As I add this footnote on March 20th, 2023, I think an intersectional exploration of how to apply Camus would be interesting.
Faith, one way that many people find meaning, isn’t dealt with in “The Myth of Sisyphus” because Camus wanted to make a philosophical argument based on things that human beings can know certainly: that humans seek meaning in life, that reason can’t explain everything in our universe, and that humans eventually die. While Camus argues that people with faith are “committing philosophical suicide” (read: copping out), I personally think this is Camus’ greatest weakness. It’s also worth mentioning that Sisyphus himself never says that he is happy; it’s a condition that other people have attributed to him.
My essay focuses on Sisyphus, work, and school because I often find these three joined in popular culture. It’s possible to imagine unpleasant life circumstances outside of work and school, yet I think Camus’ argument covers those circumstances, too.
Sisyphus’ labor “requires” integrity because it is still ongoing.