One Must Imagine Sisyphus Happy

[00:00:00]Good morning. Hey, it's Tuesday. So, in his essay, the myth of Cisphus, Albert Kimu argues that the meaning of life is the most urgent of questions. And I tend to agree which ideas we live and in some cases die for shape our lives and the world we share. But there's a problem with meaning, of course, which is that it's quite hard to find. Like in the essay, Kimu considers what he sees as the absurd life of the modern human. We crave meaning but live in a universe that is utterly indifferent to the very idea of meaning. Now, classically, we have solved this problem by concluding that the universe is not indifferent to us. That we can pray for intercession or read tea leaves or listen to the prophets or contact the ancestors or be affected by the positioning of Saturn in the sky. But by the time Kimu was writing in the early 1940s, a more secular and scientific understanding of the universe had emerged. And if a vast universe created by physical forces does not care about humans or their needs, how are we to quench our endless thirst for meaning? And this brings us to doing the same damn thing over and over.

[00:01:03]Seephus, of course, was a mythical king who pissed off the gods and so was punished in the afterlife to roll a rock up a hill which then falls down the hill. So Sephus must roll it up again and so on for literally ever. And this endless rock rolling, while good for core strength, is pretty miserable for someone seeking meaning in human life, right? Because what could matter less than rolling a rock up a hill that's just going to come down the hill again?

[00:01:26]I think the reason we still tell the sisophist story is because so much of our contemporary lives feel sisophian.

[00:01:33]As Edna St. Vincent Malay put it, "It's not true that life is one damn thing after another. Life is one damn thing over and over." I've been thinking some about Seisphus as my arthritic shoulder and I have been signing my name 85,000 times over the past couple months for my new book Hollywood Ending. I'm not alone in doing repetitive work, of course.

[00:01:52]From textile production to agriculture, human lives have long been quite routine. But perhaps even more so in the age of industrialization. As Kimu put it, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday according to the same rhythm. Which is just to say that one could imagine Seisphus working in a factory instead of rolling a rock up a hill or endlessly emailing only to have more emails hit the inbox. One could imagine Seisphus circling back and putting a pin in it and hoping his message finds you well. And yet I have found that with repetition on the other side of boredom lies a kind of sublime, a flow state in which thought becomes both quiet and careful. I've given over so much of my life to loudness, to sensation and extremity, that I forget to feed the part of myself that seeks quiet, that needs it, that finds not exactly joy in quiet routine, but something like happiness. When I'm signing my name over and over, I don't think about much other than getting each signature right. This process will take about 160 hours, and so there's no need to rush or think about finishing or any of that. There is only the work before me and doing it. It feels in the moment of the work kind of infinite which is terrible in the sense that there will always be more signatures, more emails, more whatever, but lovely in the sense that there will always be something to do and I think it's good to have something to do in the world. One must imagine Sisphus happy. Kimu famously concludes, "Maybe there is no meaning in rolling a rock up a hill, just as ultimately there is no meaning in signing one's name or writing a novel or selling mortgages or whatever else work.

[00:03:37]After all, all our efforts on behalf of each other will ultimately prove fruitless. Of course, individual humans won't last forever, but neither will humanity or our planet. It will all be swallowed up by time." And so, Kimu is right. We're in an absurd situation trying to find meaning in a universe that doesn't make meaning, trying to find permanence in an impermanent place.

[00:03:59]But there is, for me anyway, also something about repetition that is calming, that makes for a kind of contented acceptance. Yes, there is no real reason to spend 160 hours signing your name, but it's something to do, and it's good to have something to do. All that said, I've always felt like Kimu leaves something out in the myth of Sisphus, which is that unlike Seisphus, our work can benefit others, even if in very small ways. Like even if we're just making signatures or emails or widgets or whatever, we can ease the burden of others and bring them a bit of joy or at least distraction. To me, that's an essential part of the story. The universe might be indifferent to us, but we are not indifferent to each other. Of course, none of it will matter in the end, but we don't live in the end. Not yet. Not today. And so, our work does matter, albeit in tiny and momentary ways. As my brother once put it, in this world, no effort is wasted. Hank, I'll see you on