I feel compelled to talk about The Myth of Sisyphus, given that I have often talked about the meaning of life.

A relatively well-known Greek myth about a mortal man cheating death and cheating the Greek gods who ends up being condemned to roll a giant boulder up a mountain only to have it roll back down right before he reaches the top, forever stuck in an infinite cycle of having to do this task for all of eternity.

is he happy or sad about this existence?

One first observation to make is that this is a terrible life to be forced to live, that is unless you have an intrinsic joy of rolling boulders uphill and have lots of energy. Another is what does Sisyphus actually feel about it? Is there any purpose or meta-pleasure now in this way of being? One obvious point Camus makes is to embrace the absurdity of life and accept that life is fundamentally pointless and you’re wasting your life if you try to find any intrinsic meaning :-) I mean, just take a look at some common quotes attributed to him:

• “You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.”
• “The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.”
• “A man’s work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.”

Camus wants us to think about whether it is possible to be happy living a life clearly defined by suffering stemming from what he calls absurdity. The search for intrinsic meaning in the universe will always be in vain. There is absolutely no reason why there should be coherent rationality and logical explanations that exist in your infinite search space that will neatly sum up what you’re feeling and intellectually desiring for.

Imagine Sisyphus to have bashed his head into the boulder out of frustration, to later gain a permanent head injury from the blunt force trauma, to then develop an unnatural tolerance and even fondness of pain and suffering. Push rock good. No push rock bad. Push rock give me something to do, give me joy and happiness. I fulfill duty cursed upon me by the very act of living, as the Gods have willed. Not like I can kill the Gods and live an alternate lifestyle of eating ambrosia and fucking busty elf milfs. Oh well.

Maybe I should actually read the book. I find that the only point in consuming philosophy at this point is not to achieve some life-changing revelation, for it might well be nothing more than another form of hedonism. The very act of scrambling for scraps of meaning in your life is so pointless, it is fun to do so. I suppose this is a conjunction point with optimistic nihilism.

TLDR; just find something and do it’, overconsumption of baseless pleasure overflows into a powerful and intense sense of meaning, no of course not, if you believe yourself to be human, you’ll likely need suffer due to being conscious. embrace it all with loving care, through pained smiles, and forced mannerisms of your culture.