How Sisyphus Could've Found Joy in Eternal Punishment
The Myth of Sisyphus is Albert Camus' answer to the question "what's the point of living without meaning handed to you?"

Sisyphus was a mythical Greek tyrant who killed visitors to his city as a vanity project. As punishment, the gods condemned him to death. After cheating death twice, Sisyphus was condemned to push a boulder up a hill, let the boulder roll back down, and repeat the cycle eternally.
“His scorn of the gods, his hatred of death, and his passion for life won him that unspeakable penalty in which the whole being is exerted toward accomplishing nothing,” Albert Camus wrote. “This is the price that must be paid for the passions of this earth.”
Sisyphus is Camus’ model of the absurd man, one who finds his place in a world without inherent meaning and one that he will leave no matter what he does.
Camus confronts a difficult problem that can’t be fully fleshed out in a Substack post. But he’s written a surprisingly readable piece of raw philosophy that’s worth spending time on.
Why Life is Inherently Absurd
Camus noticed a tension between human life and the world we’re born into. We’re deeply interested in finding meaning in our place in the world, but the world is inherently meaningless and indifferent to us.
At a glance, it sounds depressing. He acknowledges early in the book that many people often lament a life without meaning handed to them:
“Hitherto, and it has not been wasted effort, people have played on words and pretended to believe that refusing to grant a meaning to life necessarily leads to declaring that it is not worth living. In truth, there is no necessary common measure between these two judgments.”
Life may not hand each baby a meaning at birth, but that doesn’t stop us from searching for the single meaning of life anyway. Many of us are chasing something we can never have. We’re also fighting to survive in a world we’ll eventually die in no matter what we do.
That is the absurdity that Camus shows us how to reconcile with throughout The Myth of Sisyphus.
Fighting Against the Inevitable is the Point
Camus dismisses various hopes for eternal life and suicide as bad solutions to the absurdity of living. He’s an atheist who doesn’t believe in mystics of any kind, whether they’re clergymen or solitary monks. But he also loved being alive and creating art. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957.
He argues that if there is a meaning to life, it’s the revolt against the absurd:
“The absurd man can only drain everything to the bitter end, and deplete himself. The absurd is his extreme tension, which he maintains constantly by solitary effort, for he knows that in that consciousness and in that day-to-day revolt he gives proof of his only truth, which is defiance.”
The “revolt against the absurd” sounds abstract, but think about the types of people we admire. Steve Jobs who transformed telecommunication. Healthcare workers who work tirelessly to prolong life. Ordinary people who’ve bounced back from extraordinary hardship. These are the types of stories that fly off bookshelves and go viral on social media.
We do more than admire people who are resilient in the face of impossible odds. We aspire to be like them. Camus implies that any of us can find meaning in living that way by recognizing that we’re not given meaning and by doing meaningful things anyway.
Finding the Scorn in Eternal Suffering
Near the end of his titular essay, Camus imagines the time that Sisyphus spends returning to his boulder at the bottom of the hill. Camus imagines what Sisyphus is like during the hour of trudging back down the hill to perform the same meaningless task again:
“That hour like a breathing-space which returns as surely as his suffering, that is the hour of consciousness. At each of those moments when he leaves the heights and gradually sinks toward the lairs of the gods, he is superior to his fate. He is stronger than his rock.”
Each of us is pushing a rock up a mountain. Some of our rocks are larger than others, and not every mountain ascends at a gentle grade. But even in life’s darkest moments, each of us can take a step back, see the full horror on display, and keep going anyway.
Although Sisyphus will never find meaning in his eternal task, his decision to carry on anyway is a powerful mark of resilience. Anyone who can push forward in the wake of tragedy shares this strength and deserves the same admiration.
“There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn,” Camus wrote.