why is Sisyphus happy?

Source: why is Sisyphus happy?, Sisyphus 55, 20:14, uploaded 2023-12-06, Watch Later position 551.

In moments of despair, Sisyphus 55 returns to the closing line of Albert Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus: one must imagine Sisyphus happy. The familiar reading gives Sisyphus some freedom in his response. He rolls the rock for eternity, yet can still enjoy the task for its own sake. The video begins by asking whether that idea offers anything more than a convenient story. If life is terrible, does telling a depressed or traumatised person to smile through the pain amount to a form of denial?

The boulder and learned helplessness

Camus’s Sisyphus lives in an aversive situation. He has to push a boulder up a hill even though it will always roll back down. Sisyphus 55 extends the image to ordinary commitments. Relationships, degrees, careers, and many other projects end, fail, or lose their meaning, after which people grieve and begin pushing another boulder. Life itself can look like one large boulder that eventually rolls towards death. If nothing lasts and nothing is guaranteed, the question becomes one of purpose.

The video compares Sisyphus with the dogs in Martin Seligman and Jay Overmier’s research on inescapable electric shocks. After repeated exposure, some dogs stopped trying to escape even when escape became possible. The video uses this as the model for learned helplessness. People can reach a similar conclusion after enough hopeless experiences: nothing they did changed the situation, so nothing they do in a similar situation will work.

Helplessness also appears through attempts to avoid experience. Someone can scroll for hours or drink until a bar closes to avoid thinking about a painful situation. Counterfactual thinking keeps the past open by rehearsing what could have happened or what one could have done differently. A person can then imagine a future that depends on changing the past. Both forms of avoidance let the past dictate the present whilst giving the person less control over what comes next.

Camus calls the collision between our desire for meaning and an indifferent universe the absurd. We keep demanding an answer from circumstances that cannot provide one. The demand often takes a practical form: once a relationship works, a job arrives, or the rock reaches the top, happiness and meaning will follow. Those promises fail often enough to create another round of disappointment. Sisyphus 55 treats the resulting declaration of helplessness as a recognisable response to the absurd. Awareness of that condition still leaves a person with something to do.

Acceptance and amor fati

The video joins Camus to acceptance and commitment therapy. Its first step is to accept thoughts and emotions rather than resist or evade them. A person can notice, “I am having the thought about the time I dated that person,” instead of treating the thought as a final judgement. Radical acceptance gives even the most painful reaction room to exist. The point is not to approve the event. It is to stop spending attention on the fight against a past that cannot change.

Robert Zaretsky describes Camus’s position as a lucid acceptance of the world, including its beauty, limits, joys, demands, inhabitants, and shared human lot. The video connects this to Nietzsche’s amor fati, the love of one’s fate. Nietzsche’s formula asks a person to want nothing to be different, in the past, present, or future, and to love what necessity brings. Sisyphus 55 presents the idea as ownership of a life, even when its conditions feel imposed.

Acceptance changes the sense of self that carries the suffering. Acceptance and commitment therapy calls this the self as context: the observing self that witnesses memories, thoughts, and feelings. It differs from the self as content, which identifies a person with a role or a judgement. Failure becomes something a person has experienced rather than a permanent definition of what they are.

Camus describes the self as an inexplicable process that cannot be grasped as a finished object. When he tries to define himself, the self slips between his fingers. He can list the faces he assumes, yet he remains a stranger to himself. Sisyphus 55 connects this uncertainty to the pain of treating an impermanent identity as though it were fixed. Perhaps happiness does not require complete self-knowledge. The attempt to know oneself absolutely may resemble the boulder: a task that keeps returning to the same impossible summit.

The video finds a practical parallel in the Zhuangzi through the idea of “genuine pretending”. A person can enact a social role without letting that role define their whole being. Children play different characters whilst remaining able to change the game. Their identities have enough sincerity for the moment and enough distance to remain open. This makes transformation easier. An adult still has to go to work, although the role becomes less oppressive when it carries less claim to permanence.

Acceptance as a return to agency

Acceptance does not end in apathy. It returns attention to the choices that remain. Once a person accepts what has happened, they can choose a valued direction and ask what they want to do under the conditions they have. The video allows for changing a situation when a way to change it is visible. Acceptance concerns the present fact that exists before that change, including the possibility that a person will remain in a difficult place for some time.

Rico, an assembly-line worker in one of the video’s examples, works in a job that bores and frustrates his colleagues. He decides to perform the work as perfectly and efficiently as he can. He says that he loves the acceleration that comes from using his skills fully. After accepting his situation, he finds a next step and begins evening courses towards a diploma in electronic engineering. His question is practical: what can I do from here?

Viktor Frankl supplies a more extreme example. In a concentration camp, he commits himself to the beauty of nature and to the good actions that remain possible. The video treats this as a form of freedom within severe material unfreedom. Frankl does not control the camp. He can still choose a relation to the circumstances that surround him.

Rico and Frankl illustrate Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s autotelic personality, which acts for the sake of the activity rather than for a later reward. Csikszentmihalyi’s account of flow describes an experience in which a demanding activity meets a person’s skill. Attention becomes absorbed, the sense of self recedes, and enjoyment can increase. An autotelic person has no extra store of attention. They invest more of the attention they have in what is happening because the activity itself deserves it.

Commitment gives attention a direction even when a person lacks a perfect goal or complete freedom. A mountain climber needs a summit because the summit makes the climb possible. Without a destination, the climb would become aimless movement. The same question can remain small. The next action might involve making coffee, taking a walk, or working towards a difficult medical goal. None of these acts completes a person or produces permanent happiness. There is no final state in which a life has nothing left to do.

Camus’s Sisyphus gives the idea its image. Once Sisyphus accepts his condition, he can become fully present in the act of pushing. Sisyphus 55 reads this as a kind of flow. Acceptance frees attention from helplessness and makes room for objects of love: nature, art, other people, and the mystery of identity. Sisyphus commits himself to the beauty of life through the hard work of happiness.

The video brings in Simone Weil’s account of beauty. Beauty can interrupt the selfish concerns that govern attention. Wonder and love let a person forget themselves long enough to see other people, beauty, and justice. That suspension of self leaves the mind open to what it encounters. Happiness therefore requires attention and effort. It grows from accepting the certainty of the past, accepting the uncertainty of the future, and committing fully to the present.

Happiness as a duty

The video’s question changes from why Sisyphus is happy to why Sisyphus should be happy. The world can seem cruel. A person can carry a long list of regrets and disliked parts of themselves whilst knowing that death will come regardless of what they do. Camus turns happiness into an ethical commitment rather than a prize that circumstances may grant.

This is a will towards happiness: the conscious creation of happiness in the face of external circumstances. Sisyphus 55 says that we owe happiness to ourselves and to others because goodness and beauty still exist in the world and in us. Their existence gives life something worth defending. Happiness becomes part of the effort to protect what is good from the forces that threaten it.

The video separates this duty from the demand for constant cheerfulness. Camus criticises the kind of pathological happiness that tries to prove life is free of tragedy. His Sisyphus keeps tragedy in view and still serves the present. That happiness is active and determined. It resembles equanimity or serenity more than ecstatic pleasure. A person accepts what has happened, commits to what is happening, and gives the future no guarantee of success.

Sensual pleasure and moral commitment remain joined. To fight for an object of love, a person first has to notice its beauty. The video asks whether war could appear in the same form if people held the sanctity of a child in the highest esteem. It asks the same of environmental destruction and a forest at dawn. Emma Goldman supplies another image. She refused to abandon dancing because revolutionaries thought joy damaged the movement’s image. Joy belongs to the life that political action claims to improve.

Between yes and no

In his essay “Between Yes and No”, the young Camus describes a condition in which hope and despair become equally groundless. Once a person is stripped down to that point, life survives through its present images. The video names a laughing face, a rosy-cheeked lover, a song that still moves someone, a porch light, conversations with friends, painting, kissing, swimming, awkward encounters, and bittersweet goodbyes.

The list continues through grass moving in the autumn wind, a mother’s hug, a stranger’s smile, first moments and last moments, paths that might have been, dirty dishes, Sunday coffee, a solved maths problem, a busker’s voice, the pink sky at dusk, and the happiness of people we love. These details carry the answer to the opening question. They do not explain why the universe exists or guarantee that the next boulder will stay at the top. They give a person enough contact with life to keep choosing it.

We are all creatures of the absurd, rolling our rocks up the hill. The video asks a few people to take up the duty of happiness so that they can build the strength to make life better during the short time available. The past has happened. The future has no guarantee. Some control remains in the question of what to do with the present.

Limits and sources

This note reconstructs Sisyphus 55’s interpretation of Camus, psychology, Taoist philosophy, Buddhism, and flow. The video draws on the works listed in its description, although it does not test the studies or give full quotations and page references. Its claims about learned helplessness, acceptance and commitment therapy, Frankl’s concentration-camp experience, Weil, Goldman, and the relationship between flow, Buddhism, and absurdism belong to the video’s argument here. They are attached to the source rather than presented as independently verified findings.

The automatic English captions repeatedly misrecognise names, including Camus as “Copus”, Sisyphus as “Cisus”, Nietzsche as “niches”, Viktor Frankl as “Frankle”, and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi as a rough approximation. I have normalised those names where the intended reference is clear. The Pursuit of Wonder sponsorship and the associated book promotion are omitted because they do not carry the video’s argument.

Further reading / references

• Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, translated by Justin O’Brien, Penguin Classics, 2000.
• Robert Zaretsky, A Life Worth Living: Albert Camus and the Quest for Meaning, Harvard University Press, 2013.
• Jay B. Overmier and Martin E. P. Seligman, “Effects of inescapable shock upon subsequent escape and avoidance responding”, Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology, 1967, doi:10.1037/h0024166.
• J. S. Benson and K. J. Kennelly, “Learned helplessness: The result of uncontrollable reinforcements or uncontrollable aversive stimuli?”, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1976.
• T. K. Au, “Counterfactual reasoning”, in Language, Interaction and Social Cognition, 1992.
• Steven C. Hayes and Kelly G. Wilson, “Experiential avoidance and behavioral disorders: A functional dimensional approach to diagnosis and treatment”, Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 1996.
• Steven C. Hayes, John B. Luoma, Frank W. Bond, Akihiko Masuda, and Jason Lillis, “Acceptance and commitment therapy: Model, processes and outcomes”, Behaviour Research and Therapy, 2006, doi:10.1016/j.brat.2005.06.006.
• Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, IV, §341.
• Hans-Georg Moeller and Paul J. D’Ambrosio, Genuine Pretending: On the Philosophy of the Zhuangzi, Columbia University Press, 2017, doi:10.7312/moel18398.
• Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, Harper & Row, 1990.
• Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, translated by Ilse Lasch, Beacon Press, 1992.
• A Buddhist Response to Albert Camus and the Absurdity of Life, the piece named in the video’s description as an inspiration for its connection between flow, Buddhism, and absurdism.