Sisyphean Tasks

Pic related. Another logo I'd like as a tattoo.

Word of the day, which for years has come to mind sometimes... Sisyphus. Whether work but especially weights, it all begins to feel like a Sisyphean task with me sometimes and leads to existential dilemmas about the redundancy of the world itself with all the sameness we encounter day-to-day and of my own possible redundancy in this world. Sisyphus, as you may know, was punished by Hades "for cheating death twice by forcing him to roll an immense boulder up a hill only for it to roll back down every time it neared the top, repeating this action for eternity." That'd strike an existential crisis in many people and of course from a relevant wikipedia quote, "In experiments that test how workers respond when the meaning of their task is diminished, the test condition is referred to as the Sisyphusian condition. The two main conclusions of the experiment are that people work harder when their work seems more meaningful, and that people underestimate the relationship between meaning and motivation". I'd say that's true enough for me. 

Over the years I've begun to find more relevant Camus's approach from Absurdist philosophy which he states in part, "the struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy." To risk departing descriptive philosophy (describing the condition of life) to prescriptive (what one thinks one should do approaching the condition of life), almost preachy philosophy, a lesson to take from it is to learn to accept the absurdity and mediocrity of life. According to wiki "Absurdism is the philosophical theory that existence in general is absurd, meaning that the world lacks meaning or a higher purpose and is not fully intelligible by reason". I agree with the latter statement in that I don't believe reason itself can fully bring meaning to life, it's rather a piece of the puzzle. I've been there, done that and was bound and determined to view life through the lens of intellectual deconstruction and ordering when religion and spirituality failed me only to realize that it too fails to fully fulfill the totality of what I seek. Nor do I think that labor can give meaning as I've done and do the Sisyphean task of throwing weights around just about every day for years as well as swinging a hammer to make ends meet. 

In the end I just have to accept the mediocrity and absurdity of living a life where everything can't be understood, fulfilled and controlled to the degree I like. I reckon it's all a symptom of a perfectionist/OCD personality to try to use the same lens to view different problems from different domains and scales and thinking my puny brain can find non-conflicting order in it when rationally we know that disorder is a functional part of the orderly world in which we live.

Someone may ask why I rarely laugh and maybe there's a neurological/psychological reason for it but I'd think in part because I've trained myself to look at things from rational perspectives so much so that it's almost instinctual by now to question the why's and how's of a guy slipping on a banana peel instead of just looking at it through the eyes of absurdity and instinctually laughing. But gods damn it, me, not everything needs to be reconciled, rationalized or understood; learn to laugh at things once in a while. Just be a human, just live and do, stop thinking about it so much.

"Spent the whole day in my head..." - this song has.