The Sisyphus Effect

Here is an example of consistency imbued with inconsistency:

Any time of the day, you sit in your favorite coffee shop.

You sit in your favorite coffee shop or the equivalent of your “go-to” place; an emotional safe haven that can be found in shopping centers, movie theaters, restaurants, hotels, or wherever loneliness is able to simmer in the masses. 

You feel melancholic, but you do not feel that bad because “we are all doing the best that we can to get by”. Therefore, life is not devoid of meaning, but it can be unfair. There are things, in and out of your reach, that tampered with your plans.

You buy a coffee or the equivalent of any purchase that might help you displace this feeling of uneasiness.

Then your coffee arrives wearing a ghostly smile on its face. A smile that begins to fade away as soon as the steamed milk subdues to its greater density.

As people, we are aesthetically driven, and you find that the coffee now is not as inviting as it was a minute ago. It lost appeal and you find that there is no emotional reaction to this. It just is because, as a frequent coffee drinker, you expected this to happen. It is the frequent effect.

You look around the room surveying for a similar expression and notice certain peculiarities in everyone’s persona. Someone’s lipstick looks flaky, or someone’s shirt is buttoned up the wrong way, or maybe someone’s blank expression enthralls you to a point where you lose yourself and begin to detach from the present in order to try and understand how that feeling of reverie comes to be. The coffee is losing its graded color and you get this askew view of the ideal world, the one portrayed in morning smiles and a variety of positive expressions in the midst of all the movement.

You decide to dive into the newspaper you bought with your coffee and find that the headline reads “Suicide in Puerto Rico increases” and, what happens now? What do you think about this implication? How do you feel about your fellow people? Can you look around and see them the same way?

You turn the page and find the numbers screaming up at you. There were 253 suicides in 2017, 57 more than the previous year, and a total of 1,075 suicide attempts. You look for coherence here. How many of these attempts were connected to those suicides? Can we infer that the loss of a loved one could possibly bring us to the attempt? Is this how the existential dread spreads?

Now, you might take a breather and think about what was going through their minds and maybe attribute a line of thought that might make suicide reasonable for you. Have you ever considered the circumstances?  What triggers the brief moment in which occurs this permanent solution?

You contemplate the meaning of this and here, in this moment, is when you wonder about the meaning of life itself. By now, you have probably considered the aftermath of Hurricane Maria as the central element behind this catastrophic result (which is completely reasonable), but what did it really represent? What did it mean to experience a major loss, gone in a flurry of wind?

Let’s go over some aspects.

It is natural to formulate questions of this nature because we live in an inconsistent reality with a consistent idea in our heads. An idea that, someday, all of our work will pay off and we will be set for life. An idea that has the potential of being real, but is it realistic?

It could be argued that the aftermath of Hurricane Maria could be a major contributor to this alarming number of suicides. It could also be argued that most considered it beforehand and Hurricane Maria, as an extraneous variable in our carefully calculated days, triggered these events. And, in the end, we have a stable element (ideas, plans, expectations, preparations) clashing against an unstable reality; the outside world.

You might find comfort in knowing that this is something that’s been considered before, by different theorists, authors, philosophers, people who might have felt the need to walk the line between the world of ideas and their daily reality.

Abstracción Forzada by Tyler Torres

For example:

In the Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus argued that the constant struggle with our chaotic and meaningless reality is the fabric of life, and that we could either reject it by taking our lives or by hoping “in spite of everything.” He also brought a third possible outcome which implies that meaning could be found in the void of our existence. The “coming to terms with our meaningless reality”, where we might not get what we want, but as the mythological figure Sisyphus himself was condemned to roll a rock up a hill to find it back at the bottom repeatedly, we could find it in our unfortunate outcomes and instability to acknowledge our human condition as is, and find our happiness in the indomitable, unexpected, and inevitable events that continue to throw us off. And, as Albert Camus said himself: “One always finds one’s burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart.”

The inherent meaning of life is in the experiencer. And of course, it is a mind-bending experience to think about that place between linear sequence and sporadic chaos. Between swirling coffee and forced smiles. Between destruction and hope. Between everything and nothing.  Because it is a place where you are present at all times and yet, not conscious of its elements until you are stripped from everything you think you know. It is a place where abstract thought finds the strength to push away what we are biologically programed to do; self-preserve. It is a state conceived, externalized, and exposed to a merciless world, but built to thrive above all, and be a constant reminder of who we really are. And you may agree or not with this analysis. In the end, what matters is that you question the nature of reality. After all, there are limitless ideas and concepts that abide by our perception of it. All under the understanding that our journey will eventually come to an end and that, as humans, it’s inevitable. Because we are bound to this world. To this life. And because of this, we should try and make the best out of our days and actively work on bettering that human factor.

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