The story of Sisyphus is an interesting one. Actually on the face of it, it is not really interesting. It is actually quite boring. So the gods, rightfully in their own view, punished Sisyphus to what they thought would be an even more dreadful punishment than death itself. Serving this punishment meant Sisyphus would spend his remaining life rolling a huge stone uphill a mountain only for the stone to roll back under its weight just before crossing the mountain top, and forcing Sisyphus to start all over again.
Every time, Sisyphus starts from the bottom, he believes that this time around he will indeed push the rock to the other side and get salvation. But every time, he ends up at the same point, only to start over again.
Ok. So?
Yes, it seems like a rather boring story where someone was punished to spend their life doing a rather hard task over and over again, and never knowing what it meant to reach the other side.
Often I think that life is exactly like that. We too live our life believing that we will find that ultimate salvation, nirvana, success, understanding, bliss etc etc only to find ourself at the same point over and over again.
To be crude, death is the ultimate point which resets our life. Doesn’t matter how much success, money, nirvana you achieve, we all will be finally dead. No one is going to succeed in pushing the rock over the mountain top. That makes all of us Sisyphus.
As we go through the vagaries of life, we all desire for something and we all want something, there is some drive, some pull and we go on pushing the rock up the mountain. We all believe that there indeed is an end to this journey and that indeed will come a time when we will push the rock over and then life will be a nice walk down the mountain top and we will enjoy the view as we stroll down. But that never happens.
The only reality is that we are handed different rocks. Sometimes it is the rock of adolescence, then it is midlife, then it is relationship, then career, then something else, soon it is retirement, society, but there is always something or the other. The rocks keeps changing, atleast that is what we think, but there is no other side of the mountain.
The desire to find some meaning in all of this is seeded by the stories we are told about the scenery on the other side of the mountain. But guess what. There is no meaning. Death ensure that life is indeed futile with no inherent meaning. So we come up with meaning so we can muster up the courage to push up the rock up the hill.
There is a reason why we have this deep desire to anchor ourself on concepts like afterlife, karma, goals etc. Because may be the reality that life has no meaning is too hard to live with. If not for these anchors, we won’t look forward to living a fulfilled life as we suffer the rolling of the rock uphill. And in that journey uphill is where we keep promising ourself that it is all worth it. Is it really?
additional read – https://www2.hawaii.edu/~freeman/courses/phil360/16.%20Myth%20of%20Sisyphus.pdf
On life and time 