essay

The notion of finding anything satisfying or worth doing becomes quite the mental excercise
when one realizes that the worth or value of the task at hand is self assigned.
Indeed this is one of the many thoughts that plague almost everyone at
some point in their life: the contemplation of the pointlessness of existence,
The drudgery of school, the typical 9-5 job, the neverending cycle of daily life.
Camus describes this as the absurd, quite eloquently explored in his essay
The Myth of Sisyphus, focusing on a condemned man who similarly feels a pointless existence
of rolling a rock up a hill only to have it fall back down for eternity, yet ironically
Camus describes his condition as heroic, for sisypus in his apparent punishment has found
happiness and control over his own destiny.


How can it be that rolling a rock up a hill forever can ever be considered happiness? Herein lies
the very essence of absurdity, sisyphus is a perfect image of the futility of doing anything, for
most everyone has had a similar thought: "what is the purpose of doing anything if we're just going to die and
nobody will remember what we've done?"
Sisyphus knows full well that once he rolls the rock up the hill it will simply come tumbling down again.
No matter how hard one works, no matter how hard an artist improves his skill it will never be enough,
Just like the rock rolling back down, one will have to go back to work the next day and the artist will
always find a flaw in his paintings, never reaching a point of satisfaction.

Of course, the cold rational person might conclude that nothing is truly worth doing, therefore the only
solution is to commit suicide. Yet despite many people being aware of how absurd life really is we do not see
a massive epidemic of suicide upon this realization. Perhaps even the notion of suicide is absurdist in and of itself.
To quote Emil Cioran:
 “It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.”
Quite a depressing sentence quote indeed, but seen from a different light he is simply highlighting the flaw
in finding suicide as a valid option in response to the absurdity of the human condition, for after all
everyone who finds themselves alive and lucid has been living in an absurd condition for quite some time.
Camus also raises the question, to quote:
"There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide.
Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.
All the rest — whether or not the world has three dimensions,
whether the mind has nine or twelve categories — comes afterwards.
These are games; one must first answer."

Returning to the myth of Sisyphus, one must remember his punishment came because he defied the Gods and chained
death so that no humans would ever have to die again, once death was liberated and sisyphus himself had to face death
he once again deceived the Gods and escaped from the underworld, wherein he finally receiXves his punishment of eternal drudgery.
It is here that Camus gives us the answer to his philosophical question, Sisyphus at any point could have accepted his
and all humanity's ultimate fate of death but tricks his way out of it, and is damned to roll a rock forever. Yet in this
apparent punishment one can still concede that sisyphus has actually emerged victorious, for even through this punishment
He finds meaning in his task, every time he rolls the rock up the hill he is the victor. One can imagine that sisyphus has accepted his
punishment and has committed himself to the task that will never end, and in this is liberated from the fears of uncertainty and
he has succeeded over the Gods before it comes tumbling down again. It is this same victory that ultimately makes life worth living,
what makes the daily toil and struggle worth doing. Even though there is no objective purpose to anything anyone does one still finds happiness
in doing it because one has accomplished something in a day, even if that accomplishment means nothing to the uncaring universe.
Happiness is a condition that can only truly be described as absurd in of itself.
But as long as one is aware of the absurdity of life one can also conclude that there is also happiness to be found in it.