Member-only story

One must IMAGINE Sisyphus happy

Shuvo Shams
2 min readJun 16, 2022

--

Photo by Hybrid on Unsplash

When the great philosophical work of Camus, the myth of Sisyphus came into existence, it rocked the western world.

It starts off with a metaphor for human suffering by stating the myth of Sisyphus. For those who do not know, Sisyphus is a character in ancient greek mythology who was sentenced by Zeus to keep pushing a rock up a hill as it rolls down from the top. The job of Sisyphus is to keep pushing that rock up the hill for eternity and see it roll down again and again.

The existential philosopher Camus tells us to imagine Sisyphus happy, because even though the labour of Sisyphus work is fruitless, as is our labours according to absurdist philosophies, the most important word in that sentence is ‘imagine’, and not ‘happiness’. One must imagine, because to imagine is to be human. And to imagine is to find a route and a purpose. And one does not need to imagine the same thing, despite the initial statement, one can imagine the colour of the stars as one imagines Sisyphus happy.

It is the human way out of everything, be our way out of the human misery of being born and struggling and dying. We imagine therefore we exist. We are therefore essence before existence. Where am I going with this? Am I saying Camus wasn't an existentialist? I am saying he was a dreamer. And he found a way out of existentialist dread and so should you. If you find yourself dreading the same thing.

--

--

Shuvo Shams
Shuvo Shams

Written by Shuvo Shams

Trying really hard to have one epiphany at a time in this dystopia.

No responses yet