Sisyphus Is Happy

For the past six months, I’ve been deep in the trenches of a job search, rewriting my resume, churning out cover letters, and filling in the same soul-draining application forms again and again. This is the life of Sisyphus. And not just metaphorically. I painted a cartoon of myself pushing a massive stone uphill, with the caption: “Sisyphus is Happy.”

A simple image, mythically bleak in subject matter, a little absurd, oddly comforting.

When I showed the image to my parents, I found myself explaining the myth and how it’s not about syphilis, how it comes from ancient Greek mythology, and how it was reinterpreted by the French-Algerian philosopher Albert Camus in one of the most important essays of the 20th century. The Myth of Sisyphus is not a story of despair, but of recognition. Camus doesn't pity Sisyphus; he honors his clarity. Sisyphus knows the stone will fall. And he pushes anyway.

In these dispirited, uncertain times, some days feel more absurd than others. The stone seems heavier than usual.

After I shared all of this with my mom, she sent me something in return: a sermon she’d heard at church that focused on Psalm 107:23–32, particularly verse 24: “They see the works of the Lord, and His wonders in the deep.” There’s something haunting and hopeful in it, like being foiled by mystery and still choosing to look.

The Silent Space Between the Storm and the Stone

In Psalm 107, right after the sea has raged and the merchants have lost their bearing, the language quiets: “Then they cried out to the Lord in their trouble, and he brought them out of their distress… He stilled the storm to a whisper.” What strikes me most is not just the sudden hush of the waves, but the moment that precedes it: “they were at their wits’ end.”

This verse feels like it shares a spiritual kinship with Camus’ image of Sisyphus, endlessly pushing his boulder, not in rebellion but in absurd awareness of his circumstance. In "The Myth of Sisyphus," the hero is not rescued, and the stone never stays at the summit. Yet in the face of futility, Camus offers not despair but defiance, a strange, lucid joy in fully knowing the terms of one's condition.

The Psalm speaks of men who went out to sea “to see the works of the Lord,” but were instead capsized by their own vulnerability. The sea here is not merely water but an overwhelming symbol: of chaos, fate, the unconscious, or what Kierkegaard might call “the dizziness of freedom.” They stagger like drunkards, the text says. They reel through the same disorientation Camus describes.

Yet the Psalmist grants what Camus does not: intervention. A safe harbor. A divine hush. The stone gets lifted, not by will, but by grace.

In my own work, I find myself pulled between these visions. On the one hand, the Sisyphean task: striving to create meaning with no guarantee that the effort will amount to anything lasting. On the other, the raw hope that stillness might descend, that absurdity might crack open to awe.

Art lives in this tension for me: between the stone we cannot quit and the sea we cannot control. We push, we stagger, we cry out.

Much of my recent work orbits a single tension: the space between struggle and surrender,

the absurd effort and unexpected grace. They are not meant to resolve anything. They are records of reaching. Echoes of a cry into the storm. Moments caught between the repetition of the stone and the possibility of calm.