The World Feels Wrong Because You're Paying Attention

better understand how self-awareness can shift from a source of overthinking and suffering to a source of meaning and wonder through my new book, The Terrible Paradox of Self-Awareness. The link is in the description. One must imagine Sisyphus happy. This is the final line of writer and philosopher Albert Camus' famous work, The Myth of Sisyphus. You've likely seen or heard it before, even if you're not familiar with his work, as this line has transcended its origins and can now be found in comment sections and memes all across the internet, pasted into different contexts, images, and conversations. But what exactly does this line mean? What exactly was Camus trying to say? Sisyphus is a Greek king condemned by the gods to roll a boulder up a hill, only for it to roll back down as soon as he approaches the top, over and over, for eternity. Why would we imagine such a person happy? For what reasons would he be? Is Camus wrong? Is Sisyphus dumb? At its core, the line is a sort of hymn for the school of thought known as Absurdism, a philosophy that Camus is largely credited with defining. The philosophy can essentially be summed up with the following. Humanity has an innate desire for meaning and truth, a rational understanding of everything, yet the universe appears entirely devoid of these things. The absurd is found in the conflict between humanity's desire and what is. Our yearning for rationality meeting the universe's irrationality. Our pleading for meaning and the universe's cold silence. Camus writes, Camus chooses Sisyphus as the quintessential allegorical embodiment of this absurd condition. He uses the myth to explore and arrive at what he argues is the resolution to humanity's confrontation with the absurd. To better understand where, how, and what Camus arrives at, and whether it suffices, let's start with a brief summary of Sisyphus' story. In Greek mythology, Sisyphus was the founder and king of Ephira, now known as Corinth. He was an extremely clever but tyrannical king, often killing visitors and inappropriately seducing women. His hubris was so immense, he also often meddled with the gods. In one case, he undermined the sky and thunder god, Zeus, by conspiring with the river god, Oesipus. This didn't go over very well. Sisyphus' behavior would eventually lead Zeus to having him taken to the underworld. Sisyphus, however, being as clever as he was, fooled the god of death, Thanatos, by convincing him to demonstrate how the chains for his punishment worked. In the process, Sisyphus bound the chains around Thanatos and escaped the underworld. After much commotion and chaos as a result of Sisyphus' actions, trapping the god of death, he knew that his escape would eventually come to a head once Thanatos was freed. And so, Sisyphus conceived of another plan to avoid facing any consequences. He ordered his wife, Merope, to toss his body into the public square once he died of natural causes. His wife did as instructed. Once back in the underworld, Sisyphus informed the queen, Persephone, that he had been disrespected by not receiving a proper burial. His plan worked, and Persephone allowed Sisyphus to return to the land of the living to punish his wife, so long as he immediately returned after. Sisyphus did not return. He believed he had triumphed over death and outsmarted the gods yet again. But Sisyphus would soon realize the gods can be tricked, but not beaten. Zeus would catch Sisyphus and punish him once and for all, where now he could no longer escape or outsmart anything. Enforced by divine authority, his punishment, the absurd condition the modern world has come to know him for. Rolling a massive boulder up a hill, where every time he approaches the top, it rolls back down to the bottom, and he must start again. Over and over. Forever. Sisyphus is a striking choice for Camus to embody the condition humanity finds itself in, particularly in the modern world. So much of life is comprised of tiny boulders reminiscent of Sisyphus' plight. From cleaning the house and paying the bills, to day-to-day routines and work career benchmarks, social achievements and relationships, to humanity's technological and scientific progress. These all have a kind of looping futility to them. They fail, end, or lead to new problems. Even if we accomplish them, we find ourselves essentially back where we started. Bored, confused, and desiring of something we can't quite satiate or put our finger on. And of course, all will ultimately be crushed under the weight of the giant boulder that is life itself. Everything we do and accomplish, everyone we love, everything we learn, obtain, or think we've made sense of, will turn to dust underneath the boulder of our mortal transience. And if we see no obvious afterlife, no obvious order in the universe, no ultimate answers to our why questions, it all seems to go nowhere. Back down the hill. Camus writes, To work and create for nothing. To sculpture and clay. To know that one's creation has no future. To see one's work destroyed in a day while being aware that fundamentally this is no more importance than building for centuries. This is the difficult wisdom that absurd thought sanctions. So back to the question. If this is Sisyphus' story in eternal condition, and this is what Camus is paralleling to humanity's condition, why must one imagine him happy? What about this condition gives any reason to believe in the possibility of happiness? There are, of course, many interpretations one can make about Sisyphus' psychological state and Camus' philosophical intention. It's helpful to first ground those interpretations in the cultural and historical context in which Camus was writing in. Born in French Algeria in 1913, he grew up during a period of immense cultural volatility and change. Between the world wars and the increasing collapse of societal structures, Camus existed in a world comprising heavy hearts and unstable ground. In adulthood, he had become a major figure a part of the existentialist movement, helping form its shape and popularity alongside the likes of philosophers like Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Martin Heidegger. Fundamentally, the existentialist view is that life has no inherent meaning, and meaning can only be forged subjectively through human choice and action, rather than discovered as an external truth. In the words of Jean-Paul Sartre, in life, a man commits himself, draws his own portrait, and there is nothing but that portrait. During this time, humanity began to find itself increasingly consumed by a shadow cast by the carcasses of progress and religion. Nihilism was taking the form of this shadow, and existentialism, and subsequently absurdism, were trying to find the edges of light. After all, it's one thing to endure the pains and hardships of existence when you believe there is a grand purpose to everything. When a heaven awaits. When meaning is there for you in your first breath and carrying you softly unto your last. But when the fabric tears, dropping you the abyss of uncertainty and unintelligibility, what are you left to do but fall into despair? The things you can't understand or do, the struggles and terrors of existence, all retain their pain, but lose their meaning. Camus' attempt to deal with this fall, to weave a kind of non-lethal safety net, was through absurdism. He writes, The realization that life is absurd cannot be an end, but only a beginning. This is a truth nearly all great minds have taken as their starting point. It is not this discovery that is interesting, but the consequences and rules of action drawn from it. Camus' broader argument with Sisyphus is that rather than despairing over his condition, if Sisyphus acknowledges it with lucidity, recognizing and embracing its total absurdity, and refuses to depend on grand illusions about some better tomorrow, in which the boulder will hold, or a new life will come, and continues on anyway, he triumphs over his condition. He revolts against it with his happiness. That is, his happiness is part and parcel of his triumph and revolt, rather than an outcome of it. Likewise, for Camus, we should revolt against our futile condition, against nihilism, with a kind of defiant joy, an endeavor to spiritedly continue not in denial of the absurdity of our lives, but in the face of it, embracing it without languishing. This is perhaps where one might find themselves unsatisfied with such a conclusion. On the surface, without further context, analysis, or interpretation, this can almost feel like a form of, just be happy, advice. What if one can't imagine Sisyphus happy? What if one can't imagine themselves happy? Where does one go from there? Is it hopeless? As I write in my book, The Terrible Paradox of Self-Awareness, we want more than the individual meaning and purpose we imagine for ourselves. We want more than to imagine we are happy. We want the boulder to go somewhere else. To mean something else. Part of the problem, it seems, is Camus' choice of words here. Happy simply does not appear to be the appropriate term. And within the work, Camus does not clearly define it to mean anything beyond the definition we tend to associate it with, that is, the feeling of pleasure. Even a broader definition of happiness, like content, still seems to be a bit off, at least on its own. Sisyphus is both in and aware of a wretched condition, and he's not a fool. He's smart to a fault. And continuing to strive to do something over and by force or otherwise, seems somewhat antithetical to contentment, at least without imagining other things about him. And perhaps that's what we should do. Rather than mere happiness, Sisyphus' ideal and realistic state can be understood best through total acceptance. Camus writes, The absurd man thus catches sight of a burning and frigid, transparent and limited universe, in which nothing is possible but everything is given, and beyond which all is collapse and nothingness. He can then decide to accept such a universe and draw from it his strength, his refusal to hope, and the unyielding evidence of a life without consolation. Sisyphus has no choice in his condition. And so, his choices become limited to the framework of his perspective and attention. Though it is arguably a big leap to suggest that from here he can brute force his way to happiness through merely withstanding or revolting against his condition, there's something profound still to be maintained here. In radical acceptance, Sisyphus can begin relieving the tension between himself and his conditions, freeing up his mental space and energy to determine a better way to engage with his conditions. This approach is supported in modern psychotherapy with an evidence-based model, ACT, acceptance and commitment therapy. The model works by first encouraging individuals to open up to and accept their negative feelings and thoughts, rather than resisting them. In doing so, it is found that one can form a better relationship with their thoughts and feelings, creating a kind of distance between them and one's awareness or sense of self. Thoughts and feelings become like passing objects in a sea of mental and bodily activity, of which the individual observes rather than controls or attaches to. This approach to self-awareness is what is known in the model as self-as-context, which differs from the more typical conception of oneself as being one in the same as their thoughts and feelings, which is known as self-as-content. For Sisyphus, self-as-content might entail an attitude like the following, I am rolling this rock up this hill for no reason. What I am doing is pointless. I am pointless. Everything is pointless. Where as self-as-context might entail something like, I am experiencing thoughts about why I am rolling this rock up this hill for no reason. But my thoughts are not me, and this condition is something I am observing. This may seem like a semantic sleight of hand, and that's fair, but in the latter, there is a gap created between phenomena and perception. Awareness. And within this gap, we can change the quality of our responses to our experiences. In some cases, when we can, this might mean stopping rolling the rock up the hill. In other cases, it might mean orienting our perception differently about the process of rolling the rock. Act suggests that we calibrate our awareness according to our values, be it curiosity, creativity, wonder, or compassion. In other words, once we have accepted our condition, or at least what we cannot change, we still can and must decide what we should do and what we should care about within our constraints. In this, we paradoxically reclaim ownership over our situations. We go from using our energy to resist or deny reality, or attempting to withstand it heroically, to flowing with it and orienting ourselves in simultaneously real and productive terms. Perhaps Sisyphus might try to be the best rock roller he can, paying close attention to each step and each push, getting better and better each time. Perhaps he might try to consider as many perspectives and interpretations as he can during each roll. Every angle of all the aspects and details of the landscape around him. Perhaps he might try to engage in the wonder and nature of the situation, with no dependency on ever comprehending it fully. Perhaps he might pride himself on not harming any bug or creature on the hill. Perhaps he might make ornate shaping, art, out of the paths formed by the rock rolling. Perhaps he might try to forget the rock, and focus on each step, each breath, each moment, moving with the utmost presence. Each push a kind of mantra for the silence of all things. Crucially, though this parallels Camus' philosophical framework, it arguably isn't happiness we are left with, nor in pursuit of. Rather, it is sort of a non-attachment to happiness and unhappiness. It is a movement toward the frequent dissolvement of the very question of happiness and unhappiness. Am I happy is one of those questions that, if it has got to be asked, more or less dictates its own answer, wrote author David Foster Wallace. To be fair, Camus is arguably producing a work of literature here as much as he is philosophy. In fact, Camus rejected the title of philosopher, stating, I am not a philosopher because I don't believe in reason enough to believe in a system. Any ambiguity or contradiction in his work is likely, in some sense, intentional, or at least accepted, for the very purpose of further interpretation. This openness and provocation of thought leaves room to both critique and affirm his ideas simultaneously. Like with Camus' conclusion, this still isn't a resolution of nihilism or meaninglessness. We are still left without consolation in the form of objective meaning or truth. But it is, arguably, a more stable kind of resolution. A paradoxical relief from the dependency on any ultimate meaning, truth, and happiness. In the end, like Sisyphus, we have no choice. We have no choice in being born, the nature of our minds and bodies, and the conditions of the world and universe. We too must accept what is happening, what we find ourselves in. We too must be aware of the phenomena comprising an existence inside a human, inside a world. It is our blessing and our curse. To see, conceptualize, and hope, but to never control, resolve, or know. But we can still choose values within the space of our awareness, without having to ground them in objective meaning. And we can still use them to orient ourselves toward the heights not of a hill, but of being. Perhaps, in the end, the line could read, One must imagine Sisyphus present. One must imagine him focused. One must imagine him enthralled with wonder. One must imagine Sisyphus, even if only for brief moments, not imagining anything at all, but simply being. One of the most important things we can do in life is learn how to better understand and live with our awareness, the way we experience ourselves and the world. This can often be painful and convoluted, but if faced head-on, it can also lead to greater depths and qualities of experience, helping us turn our self-awareness from a source of constant overthinking, anxiety, regret, and suffering, to a source of wonder and poise. My new book, The Terrible Paradox of Self-Awareness, attempts to do just that. It's a kind of philosophical thought map that pulls from my years of research on various schools of thought, from Taoism, to Buddhism, to existentialism, to absurdism, and more, all synthesized into one unique exploration of awareness and existence. It doesn't sugarcoat things, and it doesn't provide easy answers, but it attempts to engage with existence through a kind of compassion, openness, and radical embrace, so we can still find our way toward experiencing a life that's worth it. If you're interested, the link is in the description below. And of course, as always, thank you so much for watching in general, and see you next video.