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“The workman of today works every day in his life at the same tasks, and this fate is no less absurd.”
— Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
Sisyphus is one of those figures from antiquity who seems to have survived his mythology, I really think. Though he belongs to the far-flung world of ancient Greek legend, there is something strangely familiar about him to those of us living in the modern world, and that would be his predicament.
In the myth, Sisyphus was condemned to the underworld, where he was forced to roll an enormous boulder up a steep hill. He would push, strain and labour until, finally, the stone reached the summit. And then, just as his task appeared to be complete, the boulder would roll back down to the bottom.
And so he would descend after it and begin again.
Ad infinitum.
Just imagine that for a sec: a physical labour that produces no lasting fruit. Unlike my minor landscaping project in the back garden, nothing accumulates for ol’ Sisyphus. Nothing is completed. The summit does not represent an accomplishment from which he can move on to something else. It is merely the point at which the same task begins again.
He rolls the stone upwards only to watch it return to where it started.
And perhaps this is why Sisyphus feels less like an ancient mythological character and more like a relatable guy.
Imagine, for a moment, that you are a full-time employee in the DIY, painting and decorating department of a large furniture store. It is Monday morning. You leave the car park and walk towards the entrance. You pass through the doors and cross a threshold separating the public world outside from the demarcated territory of the workplace. You are about to surrender another portion of your finite life to the place in which you earn your living.
You clock in and the week begins. For five days, a substantial portion of your waking life is devoted to the same institution, the same environment and, to some extent, the same collection of tasks. You help customers, replenish stock, tidy the shelves. Eventually Friday arrives and you clock out to enjoy the weekend.
But the next Monday? Oh, the hill is awaiting!
And why do I mention the intricacies of working in a large furniture store? Because I worked in one — not in the DIY section but in the warehouse department. I’m not going to dignify the shop’s name by mentioning it or giving it free advertisement, but let’s just say it treated its workers like rubbish and even had the audacity to call its workforce “family”. But I digress.
In this same shop, I asked one of the DIY boys, Alan, how he could put up with working in the same place, in the same environment, five days a week, year after year.
“I don’t understand how you can do it,” I said. “What’s your secret?”
Alan turned around and, with a shrug, replied:
“Oh, well, I switch off, innit?”
By that, he meant that he simply got on with the job. He did not spend his working hours dwelling on the fact that another five-day slog would begin again the following Monday. He switched off, did what was required, went home, and returned when the week began again.
There was something almost Sisyphean in that response. Perhaps the secret to enduring the boulder is not to think about the boulder. The daily routine of modern life can be described almost mechanically:
Wake up → eat breakfast → take a shower → commute → clock in → work → clock out → commute home → eat → sleep → repeat.
Of course, I know life is not literally this simple. Our days contain friendships, love, leisure, family, pleasure, suffering, surprises and countless things that cannot be reduced to a timetable. Nor is work necessarily meaningless. Work can provide dignity, purpose, companionship, achievement and the means by which we sustain ourselves and those we love.
But the point is more unsettling than the claim that work is unpleasant. It is the repetition that matters.
Most of us aren’t financially independent in the sense that we possess massive amounts of shares that pay handsome dividends in the stock market. The majority work because we need to live, and we live by continuing to work. The fruits of our labour are consumed, depleted or superseded, requiring us to labour again.
The shelf that we stocked yesterday needs stocking tomorrow. The customer whose problem we solved yesterday is replaced by another. The email answered today is followed by another tomorrow. The task completed becomes the task repeated the analogy of the boulder of modern working life reaching the summit, and then it rolls back down is so apt!
The important distinction, however, is that Sisyphus knows this. The condemned Corinthian king is at the bottom of the hill, the boulder lies before him and he knows exactly what awaits him: the strain of pushing it upwards, the brief moment of reaching the summit, and then its inevitable return to the bottom. There is no surprise left in the task.
And yet he pushes anyway.
This is where Camus’s philosophy becomes more than a simple comparison between an ancient punishment and a tedious job. The absurd is not merely that we repeat ourselves, but that we are conscious of our repetition.
We can step outside our routines and suddenly see the machinery of everyday life for what it is. In modern Britain, this might mean standing on a warehouse floor, sitting behind a desk, serving customers on a shop floor or commuting into work on a crowded train, suddenly asking: What am I doing? Why am I doing this? And what happens when I do it tomorrow?
The uncertainty of life.
Camus captures this awakening in his image of Sisyphus returning down the hill:
“I see that man going back down with a heavy yet measured step towards the torment of which he will never know the end.”
The real tragedy is not necessarily the act but the knowledge he must walk back down. The boulder has fallen, the labour has been undone, and Sisyphus knows he must return to it. There is something recognisably modern in that walk. The British worker clocks out on Friday knowing Monday will come. The assignment is submitted only for another to appear. The house is cleaned only to become untidy again. The inbox reaches zero only to fill again. The working day ends only for another working day to await us.
And yet our labour is not futile in the literal sense. We build, repair, manufacture, teach, serve, organise and care for one another. Our work produces real things and keeps modern society functioning. The absurdity lies elsewhere: there is no final completion.
There is no ultimate clock-out, no point at which the demands of existence are finally satisfied. How long are you planning on living? Because you must repeat the same tasks again and again if you want to enjoy the comforts of modern capitalist civilisation.
I tell you all this: All you proletarians are condemned to tomorrow.
Yet Camus does not leave us with despair. His famous conclusion is that “one must imagine Sisyphus happy.” Sisyphus cannot change the hill, nor can he prevent the boulder from falling. But once he recognises his condition, he can confront it without illusion.
Perhaps this is what the modern worker can learn from him. We do not necessarily need to pretend that the repetition is meaningful, nor convince ourselves that every task serves some grand cosmic purpose. Sometimes the boulder really is just a boulder. Sometimes Monday really is Monday. The question is what we do with that knowledge. Sisyphus walks back down the hill. And then he pushes again.
