Before I get into why a Sisyphean life, let me first explain the background.
Sisyphus was a king of a place known as Ephyra in Greek Mythology. He was mostly a bad cookie – known to be avaricious and deceitful. He would kill travellers, seduce women while plotting to kill their fathers and would even mess around with Zeus himself. One day Zeus got pissed and ordered Thanatos (the angel of death kind of goth-greek-boy) to chain Sisyphus down in Tartarus (that deep abyss where souls were tickled and tortured). Something bad went down over there, so bad that there are multiple bad stories about it. Eventually, Zeus got so pissed with the man, that he cursed Sisyphus to endlessly push a huge boulder up a steep hill. Zeus was not done with just this though – he added a endless time-loop-inception sort of twist at the end of it by enchanting the boulder into rolling away from Sisyphus before he reached the top, every fucking time. This basically meant that Sisyphus was rolling the rock up the hill and then tumbling down with it singing jack-and-fucking-jill forever. For eternity.
Now, Sisyphus is symbolically known for being stuck in an eternity of useless efforts and unending frustration. Hence the term, Sisyphean – used to describe such a life.
That is the context to how life feels like sometimes. No matter how positive one tries to be, no matter how hard one pushes against the adversities, there come times when you think the worst is just about over, but then the fucking boulder just rolls back down again and you have to start all over.
The other point of Sisyphus’s life was that there was absolutely no solution to it – he had been condemned to do so by the gods, and once the gods cursed, they didn’t forgive. So he was just going to do this endlessly. Infact, even today, as I write this and as you read it, our friend would be pushing it further up in tartarus again, or be rolling and tumbling down with it. Hence, sometimes, no matter how hard you try to look for an optimistic side or try to be unrealistic about how dark things really are, you must accept that this is it – the situation/life really is shitty and it ain’t gonna get better.
Today is probably just one of those days.
The only solace one might have, is that one is not Sisyphus. (Or maybe one is – and all this is just a delusion – pretty much like Johnny the Captain Black Sparrow Depp had on his ship while he was alone on the Black Pearl while locked in Davey Jones’ locker.
Lastly, while we’re on the topic of Sisyphus I can’t help but talk about one book called The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus. (if you read it then you might just see the upside to what I spoke about above…)
Here’s what wikipedia says about it:
In the essay, Camus introduces his philosophy of the absurd: man’s futile search for meaning, unity, and clarity in the face of an unintelligible world devoid of God and eternal truths or values. Does the realization of the absurd require suicide? Camus answers: “No. It requires revolt.” He then outlines several approaches to the absurd life. The final chapter compares the absurdity of man’s life with the situation of Sisyphus, a figure of Greek mythology who was condemned to repeat forever the same meaningless task of pushing a boulder up a mountain, only to see it roll down again. The essay concludes, “The struggle itself […] is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
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