[This “Individuality and Absurd Rebellion” series of posts introduces you to ideas you’ll find in Eric Maisel’s most recent book Redesign Your Mind. You can learn more about Redesign Your Mind here.]
In Albert Camus’s famous fable “The Myth of Sisyphus,” Sisyphus, condemned by the gods to roll his rock up a mountain for all eternity, smiles at the absurdity of his situation. But in his peculiar way, he has it easy. He can’t act freely, which means that he is nothing like you.
Sisyphus has no options and no way to matter. Oppressed and rendered completely impotent, he smiles the dignified, mostly vacant smile of a man no longer with us, a living dead man, one who for all intents and purposes is smiling from the afterlife.
Sisyphus can take no action in the real world. He can respond with dignity and with his peculiar smile to his situation but his situation is not yours. He is trapped in a sense even more monumental than yours. You can still do some good!
You are not Sisyphus. You are a man with a toothache and options, a woman with heartaches and choices. You are a person who can experience pain and pleasure. You are a person who can act or who can sit there. Your delicate amount of freedom, pitted against that ocean of absurdity, is your burden to bear and your responsibility to manifest.
You, having smiled wryly at the absurdity of it all, must go about your impossible business. You acknowledge that it is absurd to stand alone, tired, out of sorts, and only wanting brunch, but there you are, rising to your feet and standing.
Sisyphus is wearing an ironic smile. Your smile is graver. You have your small portion of freedom, that portion that you are obliged to use, which makes it much harder for you to smile at all. Maybe you find that you can’t smile. But still you can act.
It is ridiculous that a purposeless universe should make it so hard on us, effectively acting, in its completely indifferent way, as if it were actually malevolent. Ridiculous … but here we are. So, we do not bow.
Rather, we rebel. Our absurd rebellion! We know that absurd rebellion is the right way. Sisyphus is freer than us because he is completely unfree. Because we have our measure of freedom, we are burdened with a real life in a real world. Let us face that.
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