the Sisyphus complex
The legend of Sisyphus is on wikipedia; you can read some more detail on it if you’d like.
For all eternity Sisyphus was punished to roll a boulder to the mountaintop only to watch it fall. The tale is ancient and reminds mortals of their quest to achieve meaning, or the repetitive nature of our work-lives.
Albert Camus wrote in his epic, the Myth of Sisyphus, that our interpretations of the tale are wrong. At first the story is a tragedy about a king who wished to live forever and paid the price. He is the personification of the absurdity of human life, or the search for meaning. Camus wrote in his final inspection that we could imagine Sisyphus happy, that, “the struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a mans heart.”
I am ready to accept that notion, that the eternal struggle is the price and the prize. The repetitive nature of research, the mindless perfection on a test or the hours we will place into our work, our profession, is the same struggle as the boulder uphill. It will fall and we will be damned to repeat it.
The do-it-at-all-costs attitude has sprung meaning to me. I’m in no race to the top, but heading that way. It is exactly what drives the greatest men in history. There are few actualized goals; the obsession itself proves to be everything. Legendary investors pour over details so insignificant, they memorize them. Bruce Lee trained so hard, that he suggested the great ‘form’ was to have no form at all - to become waterlike.
Somewhere along this road I will fail, as I have failed many times before in my quest. I have no end-game, that would be like Sisyphus getting to the top, the boulder would just fall over the other way. We can smile at the god’s and push back.
