21 Aug Do you ever feel like life is hard, over and over again … ?
Do you ever feel like life is just a series of challenges, a continual ambush of adversity?
Does it ever feel like each solution and each overcoming just opens the door to another problem?
The Myth of Sisyphus, is a philosophical essay by Albert Camus, published in French in 1942 as Le Mythe de Sisyphe. Published in the same year as Camus’s novel L’Étranger (The Stranger), The Myth of Sisyphus contains a sympathetic analysis of contemporary nihilism and touches on the nature of the absurd.
Influenced by the philosophers Søren Kierkegaard, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Friedrich Nietzsche, Camus argues that life is essentially meaningless, although humans continue to try to impose order on existence and to look for answers to unanswerable questions.
Camus uses the Greek legend of Sisyphus, who is condemned by the gods for eternity to repeatedly roll a boulder up a hill only to have it roll down again once he got it to the top, as a metaphor for the individual’s persistent struggle against the essential absurdity of life.
This might sound incredibly depressing but according to Camus, we can (and probably should) choose to accept the fact of this absurdity. In making this choice, we can rejoice in the act of rolling the boulder up the hill.
When I first heard about the Myth of Sisyphus I (like you, probably) thought it was a story of incredible hopelessness. But then I imagined Sisyphus smiling, laughing in the face of his predicament, and everything changed!