04/11/2025
“The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
— Albert Camus, *The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays*
There is something haunting about that line. To imagine Sisyphus, the man condemned by the gods to roll a boulder up a mountain for eternity, as *happy*, is to accept one of life’s hardest truths: that meaning is not given to us, we make it.
Camus did not write for the comfortable. He wrote for those who stare at life’s absurdity, the daily repetitions, the unending toil, the quiet futility, and still choose to live, still choose to push. He saw in Sisyphus not a symbol of defeat but of defiance. The moment Sisyphus descends the mountain to reclaim his stone, he is no longer a victim; he becomes conscious, and in that consciousness lies his freedom.
We live this story every day. We wake, we work, we climb, we fail, we start again. The mountain is always there. But Camus asks us to see something different, to find dignity in the act of pushing, to find joy in the effort itself, not in the imagined reward at the top. Because the truth is, there may never be a top.
And yet, we go on. We write, we build, we teach, we love, all in spite of knowing that time will erase it all. That is what makes it beautiful. That is what makes it human.
Sisyphus, in the end, is every one of us who keeps going when the world offers no applause. His happiness is not in victory but in persistence, in the sheer courage to try again.
