The Myth of Sisyphus

Afternoon at Canción del Mar, Evening at La Casita, 2019

Hades condemned Sisyphus to a punishment without end: pushing a boulder up a hill only to have it roll back down again and again, forever. A man condemned not to death but to repetition. No closure, no escape, no reward.

Camus famously asked us to imagine Sisyphus happy. That notion has become a kind of punchline in intellectual circles—a clever twist in an otherwise grim tale—but Camus wasn’t fooling around. He wanted to express something vital: that freedom is not found in escape but in lucidity. In seeing clearly, without illusion. In saying yes, even when the gods say no.

I understand this personally, not metaphorically. I’ve known that hill. I’ve pushed that boulder. Not now and then, but day after day. I’ve known futility, repetition, and pointlessness. And like Sisyphus, I’ve known moments—especially in the walk back down the hill—when something else arises. A loosening. Not joy, but openness. A space in which the striving stops, even if the motion continues.

There’s something remarkable about that walk back down. The job is done, if only for a moment. The future seems clear and holds nothing new. There’s nothing to hope for. No strategy. No escape hatch. No glory. And in that precise interval—boulder at the bottom, the hill at one’s back—something like freedom can arise. Not freedom from the task, but freedom from illusion. Freedom from the search for final answers.

Camus wrote, “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.” That’s not a flirtation with despair. It is a call for honesty. If life is without inherent meaning—if there is no God, no afterlife, no ultimate plan—then why go on living? If the human condition is absurd, as Camus believed, then what is to be done?

And yet, most of us do go on. We wake, we eat, we work, we love, we mourn. We roll the boulder--not because we’ve found the meaning of life, but because something in us resists the lie that life must be meaningful to be worth living.

This is what I’ve come to see—not as an abstraction, but as lived truth. For years, I worked as a psychotherapist, sitting with people in the midst of suffering: heartbreak, depression, addiction, grief. Most of them had been promised something more—by religion, by self-help gurus, by spiritual teachings—and were left disillusioned. Others came to me already skeptical but with a quieter form of pain: the ache of not knowing how to live without illusions.

These questions were always there--not always in so many words, but in body language, tone of voice, the long silences: “What’s the point? Is this all there is?”

And behind that question is a deeper premise: that something essential is missing but could be found by searching harder, meditating better, detoxifying the body, purifying the mind, finding the right guru, transcending the ego, attaining enlightenment, finding God.

Somehow, I’ve been spared that hunger, but I have watched it consume others. The search for the escape hatch becomes compulsive--a trance state in which one clutches at straws and is ready to believe anyone who claims to know the way out.



Disillusionment is often seen as a bad thing, a letdown to be avoided. And yet, to be without illusions is the only freedom I know: the refusal to pretend that one can get the boulder to the top of the hill and keep it there, the willingness to face what is without comforting lies or narratives of redemption. That kind of honesty can be brutal--hard to swallow. But without honesty, there can be no freedom. When the hero’s journey ends, something real can begin.

The myth of Sisyphus is not just a myth; it’s a mirror. In it, we see ourselves: striving creatures, aware of our mortality, conscious of our absurdity, and yet compelled to go on.

“But, Robert,” people often ask me. “Isn’t it bleak to say there’s no meaning? No higher purpose? No transcendence? No victory?” I don’t find it bleak. Quite the opposite. I find it liberating.

When we stop chasing meaning, we begin truly to live. Not as a seeker. Not as a disciple. Not as an escape artist. Just as an ordinary, mortal human being—no longer trying to become anything else.

That is what I mean by depending on no-thing. It’s not a slogan or a teaching. It’s a mode of perception: seeing the world for yourself instead of borrowing some supposed expert’s point of view. No one knows what any of this is. No one ever has—or ever will. There are no experts in the art of living, which is an art of improvisation, not certainty.

Sisyphus, in the final analysis, is not a figure of despair. He is the patron saint of radical clarity. In accepting the terms of his life unconditionally, he becomes—paradoxically—free. He rolls the stone not because he’s deluded but because there is nothing else to do. And that, Camus says, is enough.

In my own life, I’ve had what might be called an awakening. Nonetheless, I’ve also had illness, pain, aging, loss, and grief. I’ve known misery and pleasure, bitterness and love, foolishness and wisdom. “Awake” has exempted me from nothing. On the contrary, “awake” means embracing the entire spectrum of human experience, with no consoling metaphysics to dull the edges.

If there’s a liberation in that, it’s not the liberation promised by masters and mystics. It’s not endless bliss. It’s not peace in any sentimental sense. It’s just the end of pretending.

The boulder still waits. Hard moments, no doubt, lie ahead. But the man walking downhill—he knows something now. Something wordless. Something undeniable. Enjoy what you can when you can, and push the boulder when you must.