17 Sisyphus revisited

The philosopher Albert Camus uses the myth of Sisyphus as a parable for human existence. We are condemned to toil endlessly, without result, like Sisyphus pushing a boulder up the hill, only to have it roll down again. This is certainly the case in a world without progress, in which we are barely surviving, but is it true in a world of abundance and creativity? Can humanity escape Sisyphus’ fate? If so, what does that future look like? Let’s revisit this myth and the fundamental question about of the meaning of our lives.

Transcript

Welcome to Cornucopia, the podcast where we examine the shift to abundance. My name is Karim Benammar, and on today's episode, let's revisit the myth of Sisyphus.

I'd like to explore an abundant Sisyphus, or a Sisyphus living in an age of abundance, or how we are Sisyphus in an age of abundance. The story of Sisyphus is a way to explore the meaning of life, whether our life and all our activity and everything we do and we build in the world has meaning, whether we can talk about the idea of progress. 

And so I'm not just speaking about Sisyphus himself or his story, but rather about “The Myth of Sisyphus”, which is a book and an essay by the philosopher Albert Camus, in which he uses the story of Sisyphus to illustrate a deep truth about human existence, about the meaning of our lives And I suppose the fundamental question on this walk, on this exploration, is whether the shift from a world of scarcity to a world of abundance changes something fundamentally in the meaning of our lives.

“The Myth of Sisyphus” is a short essay at the end of a book called The Myth of Sisyphus by Al, it's one of the most beautifully written pieces of philosophy, so I hope you have a chance to read it. If you know Sisyphus, you know that he's the person who has to push a rock up a hill, and then when the rock gets to the top of the hill, it rolls down again, and Sisyphus has to walk down and push the rock up the hill again, and do this completely repetitive, nonsensical behaviour for all of eternity. So Sisyphean labour, or to work like Sisyphus, in many languages is meant to denote work, which you have to keep doing, you have to keep repeating without a clear outcome, without a clear goal.

Now, the reason Sisyphus has to push this rock uphill is that he's been punished by the Gods. The reasons, Camus tells us, are shrouded in mystery. Some say that he gave water to the city of Corinth and made the gods angry. Some say that through special contrivance, he wanted to cheat death and return to the land of the living, and finally he was captured and his punishment was waiting for him The punishment was to push this boulder up a hill, to watch it roll down again, and to do this for all eternity 

As Camus says, the Gods couldn't have thought of a crueller punishment than to do something which is so intrinsically meaningless: to keep doing a piece of work, which then comes undone, and which you have to start all over again. There are all kinds of anecdotes and studies to show that if you want to drive people mad, making them perform meaningless tasks is one of the most effective ways to do it. You can sentence prisoners to hard labour, but usually the hard labour leads to some form of a result. If you really want to drive people mad, you ask them to dig a hole and then to fill it up again, and to dig it again, and to fill it up again, and to just keep doing that day after day, week after week, year after year. Being forced to do something, so essentially meaningless, seeing the result of your work being undone every time, touches something really deep in human nature.

 So why does Camus talk to us about Sisyphus in the context of human existence and human meaning? Because his dark realization is that human life, essentially, is also a Sisyphean labour. Camus argues that the life of the modern worker is a repetition: to do work and then to see it come undone. The daily routine of doing a job, then having a day off, and then doing the same job again, week after week, month after month, year after year. And then as a reward for all this, we die. So there's a sense in which all our human travails are like that: they are repetitive, they are meaningless, and they don't yield a result.

We can all see that some of our life has this Sisyphean quality. Everything collects dust, and gets dirty, and needs to be cleaned, and washed again. Everything that is in order becomes chaotic again with entropy, with wear and tear, with time, and needs to be fixed, and needs to be maintained, and needs to be renewed. 

There is a cycle to life, not just a cycle of nature and the seasons, but a cycle that everything needs to be maintained, and rejuvenated, and cleaned again. The cycle of our eating and defecating and eating again to get our energy. Sometimes it seems that we're continuously expanding energy and not really getting anywhere. We are running to stand still. We're actually not making any progress at all. Sometimes we might even feel that we're slipping back: one step forward, two steps back.

When I was teaching a class about Camus, I would ask my students to think of Sisyphean labours in their life. One student gave the example of working in a clothing store, where all the clothes were hanging neatly on the hangers in nice rows sorted according to size and colour and type. In the afternoon, the place would be swamped with young teenagers who would try everything out and mix everything up, and at the end of the day, it was chaos, and everything was all over the place, and they had to find everything and put it back on the correct hanger, and put it back in the correct place, and get it all ordered again. And the next day, the same thing would happen again, and the day after that again. She felt that she was continuously putting things back in order, which life and hordes of young teenagers would continuously bring back to chaos. And in that sense, she felt like Sisyphus.

Camus of course, means this in the deeper sense of human existence. We have to keep working to make a living, we have to keep maintaining our body, and then eventually we die.

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Now the story continues. Camus describes Sisyphus as he's pushing up the rock, as he's pressing his head against the stone, when it gets to the top and he watches it roll back down, and then he walks behind it, and he has time to think about his situation. 

And as much as I love this piece of writing, the question is, do I agree with it? Do I agree that our lives are at bottom nothing more than a repetition of labour, that we're continuously maintaining our lives through the things that we do, and that there is really no escape from that Sisyphean condition, that the human condition is always meaningless? And, on the more fundamental level, whether the story of humanity is a Sisyphean story, whether the story of humanity is one of continuous labour, continuous maintenance, continuous cycling. 

If you believe in the idea of progress, of course ,you believe you somehow escape this cyclical repetition. You don't have to do the same labour over and over again, because you find ways to outsource it. You outsource it to pack animals; you outsource it to rudimentary machines. Once you have forms of energy and you can combine energy in machines, you build machines to do things for you, you replace the horse with the automobile. Everything that is hard and dangerous and heavy, you find tools to do for you. Then we develop a universal tool, the computer, which we can program to do completely different tasks for us. We are at the stage where we're actually building machines that will build other machines that will do the work for us, that we're programming software that will program other software to do things for us. And so, if you believe in this outsourcing of labour, then eventually there is not much labour left.

This idea of a Sisyphean cycle then has this idea of entropy, of gravity, that everything constantly falls back, and constantly needs to be maintained. The idea of progress is that we can escape this gravity, that we can escape this repetition, that there is an escape velocity when things accumulate, that there is an excess. We can build on things: we build houses and villages and cities and infrastructure. We build complex political structures, complex economic structures, complex logistical structures, complex communication and entertainment structures.

The fundamental promise that the life of your children is going to be better than your life, that they are going to have it better than you have had it, in terms of wealth, and of health, and of wellbeing, is this promise of progress.  And it goes very much against this Sisyphean idea of running to stand still.

Now, these are not just two philosophies, two ways of looking at it, or two different paradigms, two different ways in which we understand the world. We think there is a historical inflection point. We think that there have been long times in human history when there wasn't much progress, because every time there was a good harvest, and people had more children and there was peace, there would be these setbacks. Setbacks of war and destruction and natural disasters and diseases, and the net result would be that there weren't many advances, that people's lives were unchanged, that people's lives really were cyclical. 

That you live the same life as your parents or your grandparents, and that your children and grandchildren and their grandchildren would live a life that was not very different from yours in its challenges, in its possibilities, in its space, in its discoveries, in what you would spend your time doing. Humanity has historically known these long periods of stasis, where nothing much changed, century after century.

And when I talk about progress, I use words such as escape velocity, the velocity of change, the velocity of improvement, the velocity of new inventions and new techniques. The chance that there are fewer wars and fewer natural disasters, for things to grow, that we can build on things. Civilizations grow, and prosper, and thrive. And people's lives do change for the better. People's lives change so much that they're qualitatively different. Our lives are fundamentally different from the lives of our grandparents, and the lives of our grandchildren will be qualitatively different from ours.

And we talk about progress in a positive sense. We talk about runaway growth and this term of escape velocity. There is an idea of growth upon growth. Growth, which pushes growth. Of compound interest, interest upon interest, so something can grow quickly, can grow rapidly, can even grow exponentially sometimes.

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We talk about the great acceleration: the great acceleration of the industrial age, the great acceleration of the communication age, the great acceleration of the computer age. The acceleration of the last few centuries, the acceleration of the last 70 years.

The main driver for me is creativity, this capacity of human beings to invent new things. To think of new solutions, to try out new tools, to build things and build things upon things. It's the energy of the entrepreneur who sees an opportunity, who sees a business, who sees a need that he or she can fulfil, who builds a small organization to fulfil that need. A small organization, which sometimes grows into a large organization, and then into a massive multinational corporation. 

There is a certain restlessness in this energy that is always striving to change things, to improve things. That sees life as a puzzle. A puzzle that needs to be solved, challenges in terms of how we live and thrive that are thrown at us as human beings, and that we can solve through our ingenuity, through our cleverness, through our organization, through the fact that we can build virtual worlds, we can invent virtual systems like laws, and property rights, and money, and justice, and other abstract concepts which allow us to build societies.

Creativity, human beings as creators - Homo Creator - has been for me the driver for this life of abundance, this surplus that we had in our lives, which was often cancelled out by setbacks, which was cancelled out by the impossibility to think in terms of progress or to maintain progress, which has now been let loose and builds and builds and builds and really takes off. 

There are side effects to progress, of course. I am not blind to them. There are side effects such as pollution, which were terrible at the beginning of the industrial age. There is exploitation of human beings. The spoils of progress are not distributed fairly. Progress has a shadow side that we must address. But the fact that there is progress, the fact that there is curiosity and creativity and continuous creation and continuous change, which is heading in a different direction - that life does fundamentally change and that we are undergoing the shift - that humanity is no longer fundamentally driven by the need to survive, by the need to just break even in its history, in what it means to be human, but is actually progressing. Humanity has shifted into a world of abundance where there is this surplus, this excess, this inventiveness, this creativity, which leads to a new world.

We could ask whether the myth of Sisyphus is still the story of our age. Does Sisyphus represent humanity? Are we condemned? Are we punished by the gods, like Sisyphus, to repeat our lives, to create things, but to see them all undone, to have the rock roll back down every time that we've pushed it up?

If we believe in progress, if we believe in human creativity, if we believe that we're making a shift to abundance, then I think we would answer “no”. The story of humanity is not an endless cycle without outcome. There is change. There is progress. Human lives are getting dramatically better. We're expanding the possibilities of what it means to be alive, building civilizations, building a story of humanity that is creative and positive and confident and playful, allowing us to have wonderful lives, allowing humanity to thrive, allowing us to flourish, allowing us to live lives of health and wealth and wellbeing. 

We are fundamentally shifting from survival to having our needs met, to living in a world of plenty for an increasing number of people, taking the whole of humanity on this path into this world, into this future, which is better than the past. We are changing, we are progressing. History, and challenges, and disease, and pain, and all the things that set us back need not repeat themselves. The future is as yet unwritten: we don't have to keep repeating the mistakes of the past.

We could say that the example that Camus gives, of the office worker in 1950, 70 years ago before this latest acceleration, who owned a few suits, who lived in a small room. The repetition of going to the office or going to the factory, or being a housewife, and cleaning and washing, and bringing up children. Being stuck in this repetition without any sense of progress was very much to do with the timeframe as well. The jobs that we do today engage our talents, and our creativity, and our ways to work with a community of people on a project that we're engaged in, that we believe in. We want our work to be meaningful. That is a very different world because it's aimed at something: it has this element of creativity and creation and direction.

So, in that sense, I think we are unlike Sisyphus, perhaps we used to be Sisyphus. There are still things in our lives which are Sisyphean and repetitive. Things still get dirty and must be cleaned. Things still break down and must be fixed. But much of our life has escaped this cycle, has escaped this drudgery, has escaped this meaninglessness.

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Now I also think that it's very unfair to Camus - and also to the relevance of his story - to stop here. To say there was a time when humanity didn't progress, and that was a Sisyphean world, but the world we live in now is a world of progress and possibility, and is very unlike Sisyphus. 

I do believe that's true, but I also think that Camus wanted to tell us something much more fundamental about human existence, about the human condition. The fact that our lives in themselves are not meaningful, that if we ask ourselves honestly, plainly what human life is - well, we are born, we live, and eventually we die, and nothing of what we have done remains. Yes, perhaps we have built something physically, but that eventually will also crumble and fade. Perhaps we have left some great idea for humanity, but that will fade. If we have children, of course, we have passed on our genes and we've educated the next generation, and they've continued the story of humanity - but that will also fade. 

I think Camus wanted to confront us with this deep, painful truth, which lies at the heart of human existence. We are caught in a story called life, which we don't understand, which we didn't sign up for. We didn't ask to be born. By the time we understand enough of the world to realize what we're in, we are in this world, we try to make sense of it. And, since none of us are immortal, all of this will end at some point. 

Human communities start, and they grow, and they thrive, and they grow into civilizations. And then they reach their highest point. They may stay there for a while, but eventually they decay, and they're replaced by other civilizations, and other stories. And we don't know how long the story of humanity will continue. We know that we've been around for a very short time compared to the existence of everything around us. We realize we are such tiny, tiny, tiny part of this vast universe.

The really depressing part of Camus's story hasn't changed. In the end, everything we have made and created, everyone we've loved, everything we've done, everything we've achieved, everything we've built, everything we've left behind will also fade and crumble. Whether it's what we have done individually, what we have done as communities, what we've done as a civilization, what we've done as humanity. The story of humanity in the vast universe will also be a meaningless activity. We will have pushed the boulder to the top of the hill - and then, it will have rolled down again.

So, in this sense, we are still like Sisyphus. Despite our progress, and invention, and creation, and the fact that our lives are dramatically different from the lives of our forebears, the wider story of humanity, the fundamental reality of human existence, hasn't changed.

So, let's return one final time to Sisyphus. When we left Camus’ description, Sisyphus was walking down the hill, thinking about his life, reflecting upon this meaningless labour. Camus says: Sisyphus still takes pride in pushing the stone uphill. By accepting the fact that what he does is meaningless, by owning it, he makes it his stone. He brings the stone up. He says: this is my work. He watches it roll down and he does it again. And in doing so, he finds meaning in the task, he finds humanity in the task. 

Amazingly Camus concludes by saying that we must imagine Sisyphus happy. He is happy in this human condition. He is happy doing this work, which has no meaning, which has no result, which doesn't build up anything. He is happy to be condemned to this meaningless task, because that's what it means to be human. That's what it means to live a human life.

And as we revisit Sisyphus, then, for a last time, we can see that the meaning of our existence is also the meaning that we bring to it. In the vast scheme of things, in the vast story of the universe, in the billions of years that have come before us and that will come after us, we may not amount to very much. We are but a tiny speck lost in an enormity of time and of space.

But just like Sisyphus can find meaning in pushing up his rock, we find meaning in our creativity, we find meaning in our creation. We find meaning in our building. We find meaning in our invention. We find meaning in all the systems that we build. We find meaning in change and creation because we find joy in it. 

The joy of our existence is the joy of creativity, and change, and challenge, and solving puzzles, and inventing things, and trying out different lifestyles. The world of abundance we've created with an abundance of creative content, an abundance of objects, an abundance of possible lives, is a creative endeavour of the imagination. It is our way of pushing the rock uphill. I think we can take great pleasure, and joy, and pride in owning that way of pushing up our rock. 

Thank you for listening. Do check out Camus’ story on the Myth of Sisyphus, and I hope to see you on the next episode of Cornucopia.