Don't Waste Your Life

Greek legend has it that Sisyphus was a sinner condemned in Tartarus to an eternity of rolling a boulder uphill then watching it roll back down again. Sisyphus was founder and king of Corinth, or Ephyra as it was called in those days. He was notorious as the most cunning knave on earth. His greatest triumph came at the end of his life, when the god Hades came to claim him personally for the kingdom of the dead. Hades had brought along a pair of handcuffs, a comparative novelty, and Sisyphus expressed such an interest that Hades was persuaded to demonstrate their use - on himself.

And so it came about that the high lord of the Underworld was kept locked up in a closet at Sisyphus's house for many a day, a circumstance which put the great chain of being seriously out of whack. Nobody could die. A soldier might be chopped to bits in battle and still show up at camp for dinner. Finally Hades was released and Sisyphus was ordered summarily to report to the Underworld for his eternal assignment. But the wily one had another trick up his sleeve.

He simply told his wife not to bury him and then complained to Persephone, Queen of the Dead, that he had not been accorded the proper funeral honors. What's more, as an unburied corpse he had no business on the far side of the river Styx at all - his wife hadn't placed a coin under his tongue to secure passage with Charon the ferryman. Surely her highness could see that Sisyphus must be given leave to journey back topside and put things right.

Kindly Persephone assented, and Sisyphus made his way back to the sunshine, where he promptly forgot all about funerals and such drab affairs and lived on in dissipation for another good stretch of time. But even this paramount trickster could only postpone the inevitable. Eventually he was hauled down to Hades, where his indiscretions caught up with him. For a crime against the gods - the specifics of which are variously reported - he was condemned to an eternity at hard labor. And frustrating labor at that. For his assignment was to roll a great boulder to the top of a hill. Only every time Sisyphus, by the greatest of exertion and toil, attained the summit, the darn thing rolled back down again.
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This is a story I have often related to people, and one that I feel speaks to our generation tremendously.

Meaninglessness has plagued mankind from its beginning, and oh what great wisdom the ancient Greeks had! The torment of Sisyphus' punishment was not its requirement of great physical exertion, nor the fact that the punishment was to last for eternity. The great torment of this task was its meaninglessness. It is meaningless because it is not related to anyone else, and neither does it achieve anything. It is meaningless also because it did not require of Sisyphus any of the other faculties that he so possessed. He did not need emotion to push the rock, neither did he need great intellect, and spiritual power was of no use in a task like this.

Ours is a generation of Sisyphuses. Some have their rock imposed on them, others have found their own rock to push up the hill. Many never see what lies beyond that rock.

What are the signs of Sisyphean meaninglessness?

First, there is an inability to look beyond the the superficial, or if it may be put in simpler terms, an inability to think. We have lost the ability to reflect, think, and explore. The lives that we live no longer require of us all our abilities as human beings, we've almost become machines. Those abilities begin to be wasted away by the drone of under-utilisation.

The meaningless life despises disciplining and rebuke. Some old wise man said once that 'whoever loves discipline loves knowledge'. The man who lives his life at face value will not take rebuke because he hates having to improve the way he lives his life and to go beyond what he is currently engaged in. Oftentimes, it is also because any form of trying to improve his life according to the disciplining are just too difficult for a man whose various faculties have atrophied. New knowledge that sheds light on our lives are just too difficult to take in. We hate disciplines and rebukes, because we hate knowledge, because we do not pursue meaning and insight. I have been guilty of that too myself, especially towards criticism from my parents.

There is a tendency for the life that lacks meaning to take joy in the fleeting. Clubbing, alcohol, video games, food. All of which are neutral on their own, if not for their fleeting nature. Don't get me wrong, I have taken part/ still am taking part in those things. I'm not an extremist to say that clubbing or video games are inherently wrong. But the issues arise when these things become the sole source of our joy. I won't forget the deep emptiness I felt at 10am one day from a night of clubbing that ended 6 hours before that.

Yet,at the same time as we pursue the joys of the fleeting, we cultivate ever more insatiable appetites for things. I want my iPod and my PDAphone, although I know I can very well live without them. Others want their Ferarris, Lamborghinis and their landed properties. Tell me, in all your honesty, of what meaning is it having a Lamborghini in tiny island Singapore? Can we reach its maximum speeds? Do we need to go from 0-100km/h in 5 seconds? As many of us have discovered, these appetites, once whetted, are almost insatiable.

Why have we lost meaning so dramatically, especially in the last century? The most influential catalyst of the process of making us all Sisyphuses is the invention of post-modernism. Man has never been more desperate and thirsty for meaning. We have lost meaning because we have lost truth. As I reflected in an earlier post here, the postmodern viewpoint means that we have lost authority because there is no longer an absolute truth. Knowledge is meaningless because it is not always true. Knowledge is only as true as it is to the one holding it. How can knowledge be king in a post-modern world? Our generation is tired. It is tired of pursuing knowledge that is never complete, is never fully true and is never fully right. Every word you read on this page is merely a symbol of a meaning. That word may mean something totally different to someone else. How tiring it is to live life that way!

We have lost meaning because we live only for today. I know some may point that this is contradictory to my point in my previous article on sleep, but let me explain. No thanks to Nike, we have very much cultivated a 'Just Do It' mentality, coupled with that legendary 'tick' (or 'swoosh' as the official name is) that is a representation of 'correctness' or 'goodness' cultivated in us since we were kids in nursery. It seems to many of us, that living for today alone is the right way to go. We are unable to see things clearly in the entire scheme of things and to plan ahead. What is right is what feels right at this very moment, no matter what comes ahead, and hence we 'just do it'. We need to learn to live our lives with a longer perspective. While we cannot fully control what comes tomorrow (and hence the need to live for today), we also cannot discard the value of our futures. The ancient Jews had a saying 'if the dead are not raised, let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.' If we live for today, we will lose our longer-term perspectives.

We have lost meaning because we live for ourselves and our objects. Like Sisyphus, there was nothing beyond himself and his rock. He could never give his time, his efforts and his abilities to another cause. For him, it was an order from the gods. But for many of us, we choose our own rocks to roll up our own hills. We cannot expand our minds, we refuse to feel emotions, but our rock keeps rolling down backward despite our greatest effort. As a result, small meanings become big meanings. When sometimes we get tired of rolling that darned rock, we turn our attention a little bit to another stony object, making it look like a boulder when to any objective bystander, it really is merely a pebble. And then we continue with our rock and our hill.


Do you have a rock in your life? What is your relationship to it? Which hill are you trying to climb?