Sis-yphuses Vs The Myth of Sisyphus
The ancient Greek myth of Sisyphus tells of how he; the King of Corinth, outsmarted the gods to bring sorely needed fresh water to the city, shamed Zeus in doing so but then went on to cheat death and thereby escape punishment until he was an old man. However, he’d only managed to postpone his punishment as when death did eventually come for him, he was condemned to an eternity of suffering rolling a heavy boulder to the top of a steep mountain, a task which was essentially impossible as each day of his afterlife that he neared the summit with the boulder, it became so heavy it would roll down to the bottom, requiring Sisyphus begin again his endless and thankless task afresh each day.
In my working life, sometimes in hard manual labour jobs, sometimes in white collar sales and marketing positions, I’ve heard other men talk about and relating to the myth of Sisyphus. I have myself identified at times with the feeling of life being dominated by endlessly repetitive drudgery for the sake of only surviving, rather than living a life more joyful and fulfilled. Having been for a few years the sole wage earner as a husband and father, spending twelve hours a day, five days a week out of the house I often felt too absent from my two young daughters while also finding the work I did to support us to be an unfulfilling drudgery. But on the other hand, I try to appreciate my privileges and to eschew unsound and simplistic victim narratives.
Albert Camus, the Existentialist philosopher and author harnessed The Myth of Sisyphus in his work of the same title, using the metaphor of the Sisyphean task to illustrate the notion of the Absurd. The Absurd, Camus believed was the result of the discrepancy between the human desire to find meaning in the world and the refusal of the world to provide any intrinsic meaning. As an Existentialist, Camus argued that we must create our own meaning, accept and even embrace the Absurd if we are not to let it overwhelmingly frustrate us. He suggested we should “…imagine Sisyphus happy”.
Having been brought up largely by a single mother who sometimes worked multiple jobs simultaneously and made endless sacrifices for me and my four siblings, I know that women bear a Sisyphean burden just as much and in fact, usually even more so than most men. It remains true that women do most of the unpaid domestic work, unpaid caring for children, and for sick and elderly relatives.
Indeed, just a couple of days ago I met up with an old childhood friend whom I hadn’t seen for approximately 15 years, and she told me of how her ex-husband’s blindness to the imbalance in the division of domestic labour and the expectation to prioritise his career over hers caused the breakdown of their marriage. Their separation can be seen as exposing this inequity as she is now a single parent to their two young children in addition to managing her own successful career.
It seems to me that yet again while our cultural narrative, our myths and discourse so often position men as the protagonist, in fact it is women that are truly heroic and would be better suited as exemplars of behaviour and character which we should seek to laud and aspire to.