Sus and I were talking the other day about daily life, as parents and couples are apt to do. As usual we were chatting about parenting Daya and other family stuff. Boring shit. I eventually tuned out the discussion, agreed to everything she suggested, and randomly brought up the myth of Sisyphus around my current job as a data grunt for the department of health; how so much of capitalist reproduction is just that, even in fields like education or healthcare that might provide some superficial meaning for one’s labor beyond the paycheck. This was a spectacularly unoriginal and uninspiring life note, adding nothing of substance to our lives, but I still felt the need to drag Sus into my ramblings. There’s nothing really astute in anything I say these days. Indeed, I find myself getting increasingly dumber the older I get.
Sus is, of course, well aware of this.
She usually tunes me out by the time I’ve entered my second sentence of sermonizing and figures a way out of my presence before I get to my fifth. Sometimes she’ll hang around if I stop mansplaining and actually have an egalitarian conversation.
This time she hung around for an extra few minutes when I asked her why joylessness seemed to increase with wealth. Pat came back the answer:
“Because only rich folk have time to think about how miserable their lives are!”
Sus always has this ability to stop me in my tracks. I think she does it so she can get on with life. She soon left me with my thoughts on the absurdity of being born; grateful for the long enough pause in my monologue that made for her hasty escape. The rich actually do have the time to think about how miserable their lives are, especially when the desire to accumulate power and pelf takes over. The more you have, the more you want, but equally importantly, the more you fear losing it. The richer you are the more you create your own misery while the poorer you are the more you wallow in the misery you were born into. As the commonwealth anglosphere would say, it’s fucking mental.
Now, Sus might or might not agree with me, but I believe that Camus’ Myth Of Sisyphus offers us all something to ponder over, especially to help us within the self-alienated versions of our existence in this world. But not on its own as I will explain in a bit.
Why are we all Sisyphus first of all? This is easy. Many have commented on this juxtaposition with our alienated social existence under capitalism. We all know this myth in some shape or form:
As one of the mid-tier fringe gods, Sisyphus is condemned by the big wigs for all of eternity to roll a big-ass rock up some goddamn hill only for it to roll back down. (All sky fathers worshiped across this earth seem to be giant psychos but that’s a rant for a later time.) Sisyphus was bound to be used as a laudable metaphor for laboring under capitalism. Today, a moderately self-aware teenager could get to this point quite easily and possibly in a far more ironic way.
Camus suggests that we are all middle-management gods condemned to roll rocks up hills by the big wig gods of existence and self-awareness. We deal with this curse by simply denying it via forms of philosophical suicide, like organized religion or nationalism. We think we do this to conjure up meaning but in reality we do this to deny meaninglessness. Thus Camus suggests something different. He suggests that we accept the meaninglessness. This understanding of the absurdity of life then provides us less suicidal ways in which we as individual Sisyphuses (Sisyphi?) can overcome this curse from within, such as experiencing the journey of rolling the rock up, feeling our muscles get ripped while rolling the rock up, sensing gravitational wonder in seeing the rock roll down, or (what I consider to be the most evolved method) just taking inordinately long breaks from rolling the rock to smoke weed, get drunk, and jerk off.
We accept this absurdity of life where we are condemned to find meaning in a meaningless world, rather than commit philosophical suicide. As Camus suggests, once we do so, we then take it upon ourselves to find meaning in the absurd. Who’s watching how many times the damn rock goes up the hill anyway? We all must find our purpose while rolling that rock up and seeing it roll down.
This does work, but like anything, it works only up to a certain point.
What about people who have no more rainbows up their assholes or only get them for a few days at a time before wallowing in weeks of darkness?
What happens to those minds that haven’t bought into the myth of happiness or joy-seeking as purpose?
What if the feelings, the divinity, the pump, the weed, the booze, the jizz all run out (as they are wont to do eventually)?
One can feel like Camus had a bit of an exit strategy. He went dark but not dark enough. He was probably still operating under illusions of darkness being “bad” maybe? I don’t know, but I feel like he still didn’t deal with the darkness of death in its finality. That’s where Cioran’s Invincible Victim might help us. Now, this is something I know Sus will have a hard time with me positing. Especially considering that Cioran had an abhorrent authoritarian, racist streak to his politics (something he later castigated himself sharply for). I personally am much more aligned with Camus’ politics and find his absurdism to be very compelling when implemented in my own life; but it’s incomplete. For Cioran, it’s not enough. You see, Cioran was miserable and, more importantly, honest about his misery from an analytical standpoint. He clearly felt it was important to understand dread and despair to the point of giving us this show stopper from his book, The Trouble With Being Born:
“The only way of enduring one disaster after the next is to love the very idea of disaster: if we succeed, there are no further surprises, we are superior to whatever occurs, we are invincible victims.“
Dang. Ok, my war-weary, self-loathing Romanian friend.
After picking ourselves up and dusting off, let’s reduce the intensity of the word “disaster” because I think it might help ground this for our regular lay lives. In fact, if the reader will bear with me, I’d like to replace it with the similarly themed but more personal semantic of “tragedy” – for we all, regardless of socioeconomic privilege, will face tragedy. You see, many will tell you that this search for meaning conundrum is silly to rehash because we’ve always had meaning in our lives for as long as we’ve existed as conscious beings. And they’d be right. Indeed, it’s via the greatest absurdity of all:
Love.
Or rather, those chemical interactions and electric signals in our brain and body that constitute the desire to nurture some other being.
Why is love absurd first of all? That’s easy. The more love we have in our lives, the greater the tragedy we will necessarily have to bear. This is the awe-inspiring balance that love provides, something we as a society are increasingly struggling over. For those who have experienced great love and continue to do so; we walk every minute of our lives pushing away the sense of dread and despair over the very real tragedy that we will necessarily bear. It might be one of the reasons we choose to give so much more love to our children than our elders (apart from the evolutionary compulsion that is) since there’s a far higher chance that our children will outlive us and therefore we won’t have to bear as much tragedy. But even in this perfunctory acceptance of our own demise, we know deep down that our children will eventually die too. So we employ multiple tricks in our head to hide from this absolute truth; The myth of human immortality we cling to in order to go about our daily lives without going crazy.
Once we abandon this myth, we then understand that to love is to therefore accept that we will all be victims of tragedy (even if all we love is ourselves).
We want the love, we don’t want the tragedy. However, we’ve already established that there is no love without tragedy. Thus by not accepting tragedy in its entirety we also fail to accept love in its entirety. (I do believe this incomplete acceptance of love is one of the foundations of misogyny, for I anecdotally sense men doing a far worse job of it than women, but that’s a topic for a future essay.)
I can’t help but feel now that it is through accepting love that we embrace the absurdity of our lives, but it is only through accepting its inherent tragedy that we become the invincible victims of our lives.
And that’s alright.
love liberation struggle 