Camus began writing “The Myth of Sisyphus” as another world war was overtaking Europe. He was living in Paris when Nazi planes showered down bombs on the city at the beginning of June in 1940. By the middle of the month, German forces marched into the capital, casting the shadow of totalitarian occupation over France for four years. Camus fled just a few days before they arrived. He worked on the essay during the bitterly cold winter of 1940 from a heatless apartment in Lyon—handwriting parts of it with “blistered and stiffened fingers,” as one biographer has put it—and completed it in 1941.
Though Camus’s interest in meaning is part of a long tradition of philosophy and literature, the times in which he lived made his search for it particularly urgent. In the chaos of France’s collapse, in the cowardice of the Vichy government, and in the early triumphs of fascism across Europe, the world appeared meaningless and absurd. “The Myth of Sisyphus” is about how to live in such a world. “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem,” Camus famously begins the essay, “and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.” No one, he quips, has ever died for the ontological argument, a proof of the existence of God. But many people die for meaning: some kill themselves because they judge their lives to be worthless, while others sacrifice their lives for their ideals. Whether life has meaning is the only life-or-death question that philosophy has ever asked and attempted to answer. It is, therefore, the most important question of all.
As Camus writes, we long for rational explanations of the world and seek order and unity, but the world is chaotic, disordered, and senseless—it has no “rational and reasonable principle.” We wonder why we exist, how we came into being and for what purpose, but the world responds with silence. We can try to satisfy our yearning by making a leap to God, religion, or some other transcendent source of meaning that we take on faith. But if we accept as true only what we absolutely know, then there are “truths,” as Camus puts it, but no single Truth.
To Camus, the fact that humans search ceaselessly for meaning but do not find it anywhere in the world renders life absurd; everything—from grand historical events to the great effort we all put into living our lives—seems pointless. The realization that there is no external source of meaning, no greater point or purpose to anything we do, inundates us with “nausea,” to use the word of Camus’s onetime friend, the existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre.
Of course, you don’t have to be a French existentialist—or, for that matter, a Russian novelist—to feel the weight of the absurd descend on you. On the Conan O’Brien show in 2013, the comedian Louis C.K. described coming into contact with something like Sartre’s nausea, Camus’s absurd, and Tolstoy’s horror. Like all great comedians, C.K. is a philosopher masquerading as a funny man: “Underneath everything in your life,” he told O’Brien, “there is that thing, that empty—forever empty. That knowledge that it’s all for nothing and that you’re alone. It’s down there. And sometimes when things clear away, you’re not watching anything, you’re in your car, and you start going, ‘Oh no, here it comes. That I’m alone.’ It starts to visit on you. Just this sadness. Life is tremendously sad, just by being in it.”
When an inconsolable Tolstoy arrived at this point in his reasoning, he concluded that suicide was the only reasonable escape from the absurdity of life. Tolstoy, of course, eventually took another path. He found meaning in faith. But Camus rejects both faith and suicide as solutions to the problem of life’s meaninglessness. For Camus, it’s impossible to know whether God exists or whether any of the beliefs we take on faith are true. Given that, we must learn to live significant lives “without appeal” to God or faith. Yet to commit suicide would be to yield to the blind forces of a meaningless world. It would be to give in to the absurd and, in doing so, to compound it.
This might sound pretty grim, but the absurdity of life, Camus argues, does not inevitably lead to despair. Rather, it opens up new opportunities. “Even within the limits of nihilism,” Camus writes, “it is possible to find the means to proceed beyond nihilism.” With meaning no longer imposed on us from an outside source, we have the freedom to create it for ourselves. As Sartre wrote, “Life has no meaning a priori….[I]t’s up to you to give it a meaning, and value is nothing but the meaning that you choose.”
Camus illustrates this point by ending his essay with an ode to the ancient Greek hero Sisyphus, who was condemned by the gods to carry a boulder up to the peak of a mountain only to have it come tumbling down right before he reaches the summit. He performs this futile task for all of eternity. It’s difficult to imagine a more meaningless existence than the one that Sisyphus ekes out. But Camus wants us to see that Sisyphus’s life is extremely valuable. In fact, it serves as a model for us all.
To Camus, living a meaningful life requires adopting an attitude of defiance toward the absurd, which is precisely what Sisyphus does. Sisyphus, who is being punished for deceiving the gods and attempting to escape death, does not lament his fate or hope for a better life. Rather, in contempt of the gods who want to torment him, he embodies the three qualities that define a worthwhile life: revolt, passion, and freedom.
Each time he returns to the base of the mountain, he faces a choice: to give up or to labor on. Sisyphus chooses the struggle. He accepts his task and throws himself into the grueling work of carrying the boulder up the mountain. Having scorned the gods, he becomes the master of his own fate. “His rock is his thing,” as Camus puts it—it’s what gives his life meaning and purpose. Though his labors may seem pointless, they are endowed with meaning through the triumphant attitude with which he approaches his task. “The struggle itself toward the heights,” Camus writes, “is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
The struggle itself. When Camus tells us to imagine Sisyphus happy, he does not mean a feel-good kind of happiness. He is talking about the sense of accomplishment and contentment that results from devoting yourself to a difficult but worthwhile task. Camus wants us to see that like Sisyphus, we can live our lives to the fullest by embracing the struggle with dignity—by embracing, as he puts it in his notebooks, the “misery and greatness of the world.”
Camus obeyed this imperative in his own life. As he was working on “The Myth of Sisyphus” in Paris in 1940, he wrote a letter to a friend expressing his state of mind: “Happy? Let’s not talk about it….But even if my life is complicated, I haven’t stopped loving. At this time there is no distance between my life and my work. I’m doing both at the same time, and with the same passion.” If Tolstoy found meaning in the infinite, Camus finds it in the finite, in the daily task of living. The epigraph to “The Myth of Sisyphus” is a verse from Pindar, the ancient Greek poet: “Oh my soul, do not aspire to immortal life, but exhaust the limits of the possible.”
Rather than give up on the world, we can confront it directly and with passion, and create for ourselves a meaning out of the pain, loss, and struggles that we endure. “To the question of how to live without God,” Camus’s biographer Olivier Todd writes, “Camus had three answers: live, act, and write.”
Just as Sisyphus’s rock was the “thing” that gave his life meaning, Camus’s “thing” was his writing. Everyone, Camus believed, needs some “thing,” some project or goal, to which he chooses to dedicate his life, whether it’s a large boulder—or a small rose. Consider the beloved children’s story The Little Prince, which is a wonderful expression of this wisdom. The prince lives on a tiny planet where he spends his time tending the plants and flowers in his garden. “It’s very tedious work,” he says, “but very easy.” One day, he notices a rose that is growing on its surface—a flower unlike any he’s seen on his planet before. The prince falls in love with the mysterious rose, whom he devotedly waters and shields from the wind. But she is a vain and needy flower, and the prince eventually grows weary of her, deciding to leave his planet and explore the broader universe.
He is on a quest for knowledge and understanding, and sees many strange sights during his travels. After visiting a few other planets, the prince finds his way to Earth, where he comes across a rose garden. Though the prince left his rose behind, he still cares for her, and seeing these other roses makes him disconsolate; he thought that his rose was the only flower of its kind in the universe, but now he sees that there are hundreds of others like her.
Just as he has reached the bottom of his despair, a wise fox calls out to him. The fox teaches the prince many lessons, but the most important one concerns the rose the prince left behind. The rose is not just another rose out of many, he tells the prince; it is special because of what the prince gave to the flower: “It’s the time you spent on your rose that makes your rose so important…You become responsible forever for what you’ve tamed. You’re responsible for your rose.”
When the prince returns to the field of roses, he takes the fox’s wisdom with him and addresses them: “You’re lovely, but you’re empty,” he tells them. “One couldn’t die for you. Of course, an ordinary passerby would think my rose looked just like you. But my rose, all on her own, is more important than all of you together, since she’s the one I’ve watered. Since she’s the one I put under glass. Since she’s the one I sheltered behind a screen. Since she’s the one for whom I killed the caterpillars (except the two or three for butterflies). Since she’s the one I listened to when she complained, or when she boasted, or even sometimes when she said nothing at all. Since she’s my rose.”
In other words, it was the prince’s investment of time, energy, and care into the rose that made her special—and that made their relationship meaningful.
This is not just literary or philosophical fancy. Social scientists, too, have found that when we put effort into building something, we tend to value it more—a phenomenon psychologists call the “IKEA effect.” Putting together IKEA furniture makes people like it more, and what holds true for cheap Swedish furniture can also be applied to our lives more broadly. When we devote ourselves to difficult but worthwhile tasks—whether that means tending a rose or pursuing a noble purpose—our lives feel more significant.
The converse, of course, is also true. The most important parts of life require hard work and sacrifice. This is a lesson that many of us learn as children as we’re first trying out sports, struggling through a hard class, learning how to play an instrument, or discovering how to nurture and maintain close friendships. Unfortunately, as we grow up, we tend to forget that lesson. The busyness of adult life makes quick and easy solutions to difficult life problems alluring. But to live well, we should take to heart the wisdom we learned in our younger years. Only by facing challenges head-on can we truly find meaning in our lives.
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Though the meaning of life may remain obscure, we all can and must find our own sources of meaning within life. This was the great insight of existentialist thinkers like Camus—and, a decade before “The Myth of Sisyphus” was published, Will Durant came to the same conclusion. After reading through the responses to the letter he sent to his friends and colleagues, he discovered that each of them found meaning in their own way. Gandhi wrote that he found meaning in the “service of all that lives.” The French priest Ernest Dimnet found it in looking beyond his personal interest. “You ask what life has done for me?—It has given me a few chances to break away from my natural selfishness and for this I am deeply grateful.” The filmmaker Carl Laemmle, one of the founders of Universal Studios, mentioned his children: “You ask ‘where in the last resort my treasure lies?’—I think it lies in an almost frenzied desire to see my children and my children’s children well cared for and happy.” Owen C. Middleton, who was serving a life term in prison, found meaning in simply being part of the world: “I do not know to what great end Destiny leads us, nor do I care very much. Long before that end, I shall have played my part, spoken my lines, and passed on. How I play that part is all that concerns me. In the knowledge that I am an inalienable part of this great, wonderful, upward movement called life, and that nothing, neither pestilence, nor physical affliction, nor depression—nor prison—can take away from me my part, lies my consolation, my inspiration, and my treasure.”
In 1930, the year that the suicidal man approached Durant in his yard, several others wrote to the philosopher expressing their desire to kill themselves. Durant wrote back, explaining, as best he could, why he believed life was worth living. Later, he synthesized his responses into a single statement that concludes On the Meaning of Life.
To Durant, meaning arises from transcending the self. “If, as we said at the outset,” he writes, “a thing has significance only through its relation as part to a larger whole, then, though we cannot give a metaphysical and universal meaning to all life in general, we can say of any life in particular that its meaning lies in relation to something larger than itself.” The more you connect with and contribute to that something, Durant believed, the more meaningful your life is. For Durant specifically, that “something” was work and family.
Some of the people who wrote to Durant were almost certainly out of work as a result of the Great Depression. They were not the only ones down on their luck. Joblessness rates skyrocketed during the Great Depression and peaked at 25 percent in 1933. At the same time, the suicide rate in the United States reached an all-time high. Researchers have found that across history, suicide rates tend to rise with unemployment—and it’s easy to understand why: Work is a major source of identity, value, and purpose for people. It gives them something to do with their time, a sense of worth, and an opportunity to contribute to society and to support their families. When people lose their jobs, they are losing not only their livelihood, but a powerful source of meaning.
Durant counseled those who did not believe their lives were meaningful to find some sort of work, even if it was helping out on a farm in exchange for food and a bed until something better came along. To be productive and in the service of another person was a first step toward reengaging with life. “Voltaire once remarked,” he writes, “that he might occasionally have killed himself, had he not had so much work on his hands.”
In 1988, some fifty years after Durant published his book, Life magazine undertook a similar venture. The editors there wrote to over one hundred influential individuals of the time—from the Dalai Lama, Rosa Parks, and Dr. Ruth to John Updike, Betty Friedan, and Richard Nixon—asking them about the meaning of life. The magazine’s editors did not learn of Durant’s project until they were already well into collecting and editing the responses, but like Durant, they found that their respondents drew meaning from a wide variety of sources.
The psychologist and cell biologist Joan Borysenko, for example, told the story of one of her patients, who discovered the meaning of her life during a near-death experience, when she saw the key moments of her past play out in her mind like a movie. “She was amazed,” Borysenko explains, “that her achievements as a lawyer meant little; the highlight of this ‘replay’ was a chance meeting she’d had years ago with a teenager who had checked out her groceries in the supermarket one day. Sensing sorrow in the boy’s eyes, she’d patted his hand and whispered a few words of reassurance. Eyes locked in empathy, they had momentarily forgotten the illusion that they were strangers and shared a moment of deep connection.” For the lawyer, meaning was kindled by sparks of love, compassion, and understanding in the checkout line.
Jason Gaes, a twelve-year-old boy with cancer, offered a touching explanation of what makes life meaningful for him. “I used to wonder,” he wrote to Life, “why did God pick on me and give me cansur. Maybe it was because he wanted me to be a dr. who takes care of kids with cansur so when they say ‘Dr Jason, Sometimes I get so scared I’m going to die’ or ‘you don’t know how weird it is to be the only bald kid in your whole school,’ I can say, ‘Oh yes I do. When I was a little boy I had cansur too. And look at all my hair now. Someday your hair will grow back too.’ ” F
or Gaes, confronting death helped him discover the purpose of his life.
For the novelist Madeleine L’Engle, meaning came from being a storyteller, taking the strands of human experience and weaving them into a coherent narrative. Echoing Camus, she wrote: “The only certainty is that we are here, in this moment, in this now. It’s up to us: to live fully, experiencing each moment, aware, alert and attentive. We are here, each one of us, to write our own story—and what fascinating stories we make!”
Rabbi Wolfe Kelman wrote about the historic civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery in 1965. Martin Luther King Jr. was walking ahead of him, and as the large group crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, they sang together. “We felt connected, in song, to the transcendental, the ineffable,” Kelman wrote to Life. “We felt triumph and celebration. We felt that things change for the good and nothing is congealed forever. That was a warming, transcendental, spiritual experience. Meaning and purpose and mission were beyond exact words: meaning was the feeling, the song, the moment of overwhelming spiritual fulfillment. We were experiencing what [Rabbi Abraham Joshua] Heschel called the meaning beyond mystery.”
Each of the responses to Durant’s letter and Life’s survey was distinct, reflecting the unique values, experiences, and personalities of the respondents. Yet there were some themes that emerged again and again. When people explain what makes their lives meaningful, they describe connecting to and bonding with other people in positive ways. They discuss finding something worthwhile to do with their time. They mention creating narratives that help them understand themselves and the world. They talk about mystical experiences of self-loss.
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