Sisyphus was a mythical King. He annoyed Zeus who punished him by having him eternally roll a boulder up a hill, only to trip at the top before he can push it over the crest and have the boulder roll to the bottom, undoing his efforts and forcing him to begin again. You already know who Bill Murray is, and I promise we will get to him, but first we get existential.
Sisyphus is an interesting story, the essence of futility, which also makes him an unfortunate metaphor for the human condition; living the same day, over and over, forever labouring, but never moving forward. He undertakes the same overwhelming challenge each day only to have success elude him because he struggles against the inevitable and unrelenting tide. Sound depressing and familiar?
There’s this writer, Camus, that tells us that we have the story of Sisyphus wrong. We must imagine Sisyphus happy, he says. That’s an argument that seems both practical and intuitive to me, and it is particularly relevant to the current times. I wanted to find out how he arrived at that conclusion.
Now, Camus is not a cheery guy. He’s famous for his novel about an indifferent fellow who murders a stranger. His essay, The Myth of Sisyphus, is an exploration of suicide as a logical conclusion to life. So I was prepared for dark and dense and was not disappointed. Yikes! What a slog. I’ll summarize and save you the trouble.
The problem is our rational thinking mind. You don’t ever look at your dog and fear it’s having an existential crisis about the meaning of life. Our ability to think, to remember the past in context and project into the future, and to rationalize the in-between, this is what separates us from the other animals, but it’s also what leads us into trouble. Camus’ approach was that if it’s our thinking minds that got us into this mess then let’s see if we can think our way out of it. He wanted to look at the problem factually, to accept only a solution that would satisfy his rational mind and that he can judge as true through his own senses and experience.
Humans have a desire to find meaning in their existence, the universe, however, does not care, it offers no answers, there is no empirical rational path to provide us the meaning that we desperately crave. This situation, in which we search for meaning in an indifferent universe is what Camus calls the absurdity of our existence. We can simply make the paradox disappear by injecting it with hope, with belief, with God. Now, Camus made no argument against God, nor would I. If spirituality or faith gives you solace, that’s wonderful. The rest of us have some doubts.
Camus admits hope is a good trick, but it doesn’t quench the desire for a solution that satisfies the mind and that we can judge as true through experience. Maybe God exists, but we can neither confirm nor disprove this, so it’s not satisfying. Where did we come from? God. Cool, where did God from? You see what I’m saying, it doesn’t scratch the itch.
The rational solution to our absurd situation may be suicide. All life ends in death. We know where we are heading we could just get on with it. If the act of living is often painful and has no meaning, why not skip to the end!? It’s a decent argument. Many have made it and most of us have considered it. The big question is, if we concede that life may be meaningless, does that mean it is not worth living?
This is the bit I was interested in when I started the drudgery of this essay. Who amongst us has not occasionally thought, with some hopelessness, “What is the point?” We all sometimes arrive at this point of view, it’s helpful to know some ways to shift away from it. Occasionally, I check in with smarter folks of yore, like Camus, who we will distill and then shortly abandon.
Camus’ solution is to embrace the absurd nature of our lives, “But crushing truths perish from being acknowledged.” Be aware that all we can know is that we are here, and our time is brief. The answer is not suicide, to shun life, but rather to drink with both hands, live life to its fullest, this is the “absurd man”. That’s not exactly how Camus words it, but it’s the thread I pulled. He provides several examples of his “absurd man”, but his examples suck, in my opinion, but his conclusion, when he gets to it, works for me.
Everyday Sisyphus is different. Everyday he finds the strength to do it all again, to succeed at the impossible, and it is the struggle that is the thing.
“The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy” (The Myth of Sisyphus, 1942).
A better example of an absurd man is Bill Murray, in Harold Ramis’ 1993 classic, Groundhog Day. A film so iconic and ingrained in our collective conscience that I’m positive someone around you has referenced the film to describe the feeling we’re all having, created by this extended quarantine.
Our hero Bill Murray gets stuck in a Sisyphean loop, waking each morning to literally repeat the same day. It all resets every 24 hours, nothing he does makes any difference. On top of that, Bill is the only person that remembers what happened, nobody else is conscious of the loop they are all in, he is truly alone in his struggle. A man in this scenario cannot have hope his existence has meaning.
Bill finds meaning in everyday human experience; he becomes Nietzsche’s “super human”. After trying every indulgence, acting without moral consequence or consideration, exploring the edges of possible human behaviour and action through countless life-times, he chooses to fill his days with personal growth and human connection. What’s critical to Bill’s movie experience, and by extension our literal experience, is that although his day repeats, the stage set with all the props and players at the same queues, Bill is not the same each day! He evolves, he changes, he learns that happiness does not lie in his circumstances, but in his perspective.
“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves. Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way. Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” - Viktor Frankl
Push a rock up a hill or report if the groundhog sees his shadow, what’s the difference? Any human day is repetitive. Quarantine doesn’t help.
Yes, the days don’t change in Groundhog Day, but Bill does, and that makes all the difference. He learns a little each day and in tiny increments becomes a talented pianist and sculptor, he learns French, he makes genuine connections with others, he evolves into a man happy with his own existence. He comes to understand that he doesn’t control his situation but he does control his reaction to it. He embraces the day to day experiences and finds joy there.
It’s refreshing and wonderful that after all the digging I did down this rabbit hole, that this funny quirky movie takes a lot of philosophies and great thinkers and ties them up into a nice entertaining package that provides great insight on how to live a happy and meaningful life. This quarantine does feel like Groundhog Day, but it’s ceased to be a complaint in my mind. Now it’s a road map out of that feeling. Each day does seem the same, which is fine, because I’m not the same. I can learn a little bit today that will add up in the long run. I can find joy in the everyday and believe that meaning is found in its pursuit.
Feb 02