I came across a line from Albert Camus recently and couldn’t shake it.
“One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
In case the story has faded since school, Sisyphus was a king who angered the Greek gods. His punishment was to push an enormous boulder up a mountain, only to watch it roll back down every time he neared the top, for all eternity. It’s hard to picture a better image of futility.
Yet Camus, in the last line of his essay The Myth of Sisyphus, asks us to picture this man happy. His reasoning is that life comes with no built-in guarantee of meaning, and the summit was never the point. Sisyphus wins by accepting his situation with clear eyes and owning the struggle anyway.
As Camus put it, “The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart.”
That is a radical idea for people like us. Many of us spent our careers as strivers, living by goals, metrics, and constant self-judgment. We set those standards ourselves, and they leave us perpetually unsatisfied. The moment we reach one goal, we move the goalposts further away.
Let that sit for a moment.
When winning and losing determine our happiness, only success is rewarded and failure is derided. That binary thinking is a path to misery. Nobody wins all the time, and when we lose, we’re left sitting in shame.
After years of hard work, I had reached a point in my exercise routine I was proud of: managing 75-pound dumbbell rows for a set of ten on each arm. Then an illness knocked me flat for over a month. When I finally got back to the gym, I could barely manage 30-pound dumbbells. The boulder had rolled all the way back to the bottom.
I could have given up. I could have spent every workout mourning what I had lost. Instead, I made a different decision. I chose to start over and find satisfaction in the climb itself, rather than focus on getting back to my previous personal best. To my surprise, the second climb meant more to me than the first.
Retirement can feel a lot like that moment at the bottom of the hill. The title, the wins, and the scoreboard we measured ourselves by are suddenly gone, and we’re facing the climb again. Camus would remind us that the climb was always where the meaning lived.
In the end, it comes down to agency. The power to decide how we meet each obstacle and each new beginning.
We can’t always keep the boulder from rolling downhill. But we can decide what the next climb means to us.
If this resonates, I’d love to hear your own “boulder” story.
