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The Myth of Sisyphus
Camus's 1942 philosophical essay that opens with the claim that there is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and it is suicide — and ends by imagining Sisyphus happy.
The Myth of Sisyphus is the founding text of Camus's philosophy of the absurd. Published in 1942 alongside The Stranger, it asks why, given the universe's refusal to confirm human significance, a conscious being should continue to live — and refuses every easy answer. The essay works through the available responses (religious faith, philosophical suicide, literal suicide) and finds each of them dishonest. What remains is the figure of Sisyphus, condemned by the gods to push a boulder up a mountain forever, watch it roll back down, and push it up again. Camus reads the myth against its designers: the punishment, fully embraced, becomes the highest freedom. The act matters, not the outcome. The consciousness of the struggle, not the permanence of its result, is where human dignity lives.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The essay was written during the Nazi occupation of France, when the question of whether life is worth living was not academic.