My work as an educator has felt Sisyphean of late. Just this past week, I’ve experienced some acute frustration and setbacks, not to mention an overarching sense of fatigue, ineffectuality, and even cynicism.
Monday afternoon, I found myself walking up the stairwell toward my classroom remembering the apathy in the students’ faces the prior week. I was dreading another session during which I would try—too hard!—to be and sound excited and engaged. I stopped and mumbled aloud to myself: “I don’t want to be here.”
On Tuesday, I had to cancel my weekly class at the local prison. The prison was on lockdown, with no movement allowed among the prison population, including our Augustana students. I’ve now learned that the lockdown was also a prison-wide shakedown. Twenty incarcerated men ended up in the segregation unit. Some of our students had their school supplies confiscated and disposed of.
On Wednesday, I represented our center for faith and learning at an academic initiatives meeting. I was with people who care about their work—deans, librarians, and directors of institutional data and engaged learning. And yet, sitting there, listening and sharing information and affirmation, the words I mumbled in the stairwell came back into mind: “I don’t want to be here.”
On Thursday, I learned that the three international students from my college who had their visas revoked two weeks prior had them reinstated. This was very good news, as our president, who signed onto an amicus brief resisting the revocations, insisted. The problem is that those students have already left the country and many of them (plus others who will leave for summer break) will decide that studying in the United States is too risky a venture.
My own low-level moments of despair in front of unengaged students or beside committed colleagues are nothing compared to what an incarcerated student must feel when the drafts of his final papers are confiscated, or what an international student feels when her study visa is reinstated only after she is looking for work in Colombia. My problems are the problems of the privileged—in this case, of those whose work is normally considered meaningful and so who struggle when it seems less so. Indeed, according to Jonathan Malesic, burnout—a combination of exhaustion, depersonalization, and ineffectuality—disproportionally plagues those of us in the “caring professions.” It is the widening gap between our ideals for work, including the ideal of having a vocation or calling, and the everyday realities of that work that lead to burnout. Yet the gap between commitment and discouragement only multiplies for the underprivileged. Imagine the whiplash experienced by an incarcerated student who feels the real intellectual freedom of a college classroom only to be arbitrarily subjugated, once again, by the penal system.
Sisyphean seems an appropriate term to characterize this up again, down again precariousness of our work. According to the Greek myth, Sisyphus, the king of Ephyra, cheats death—at which point, the gods get even by condemning Sisyphus to push a boulder up a hill, only to have it roll back down. Sisyphus hikes down to get it, rolls it back up, and the spurious work repeats itself, ad infinitum.
The absurdity of doing work that is undone and then doing it again is hard enough to bear. Much harder still are these final sentences from “The Myth of Sisyphus,” the 1942 essay by the French philosopher Albert Camus: “The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
Sisyphus happy? Really?
Camus saw conscious human existence as thoroughly and forever absurd. In contrast, professional burnout stems from the gap between the ideals and realities of work—what we might call existential burnout, and what Camus called absurdity—stems from the gap between humanity’s primordial expectation that life be meaningful and the utter meaninglessness of the world itself.
When Camus tells us to imagine Sisyphus happy, is he asking us not only to bear this intrinsically tragic existence, but to do so while forcing a smile? A closer reading of Camus suggests something much subtler and—for all its existential profundity—something applicable to our workaday lives.
First, notice that Camus doesn’t tell us that Sisyphus himself is happy, or should be, but that we must imagine him so. That distinction seems important. As Bonnie Miller-McLemore notes, we have no shortage of life coaches and job-crafting consultants giving advice about how to get past the “dark side of callings” in order to fully flourish. The advice can make it sound as though it is the worker’s responsibility to make herself happy by force of will, and by suppressing how she really feels. At worst, the advice is like that of a customer service representative being instructed to answer angry customers with an upbeat positive attitude, but this requirement only extracts “emotional labor” from those already depleted.
Those of us who experience our work as Sisyphean should say as much, whether alone in a stairwell or, perhaps more effectively, to those whom we love and trust. What other people can do is to hear the full force of that weariness, while also imagining (and so hoping) that despair is not the only word. I certainly shouldn’t tell an incarcerated student to stay positive about or grateful for his education after it has been disrupted and belittled. But nor should I multiply his anguish by sharing my own cynicism about what Dorothy Day called our “filthy rotten system” that we are trying to teach and learn within. I must imagine him happy, and so hope that his own hope has space to emerge.
For his part, Camus is most interested in the moment immediately after the rock rolls down. He imagines Sisyphus going back down “with a heavy yet measured step.” He is still bound to his fate, but by freely following it, he is also “superior to [it].” In other words, by acknowledging and affirming that which is otherwise futile and frustrating, Sisyphus is able to transform his fate into destiny. In Camus words, “crushing truths perish [by] being acknowledged.”
The truth I articulated in the stairwell wasn’t exactly crushing, but it, too, lessened when I named it. I imagine the incarcerated student voicing the same curious mixture of resignation and newfound freedom. When he utters something such as, “I have to rewrite this [expletive] paper yet again!” he might by that also mean, “I must do this. I can do no other.” He’s plodding down the hill with heavy and measured steps, ready to re-shoulder the boulder.
Finally, we should remember how even our most futile and fatiguing work is also unlike that of Sisyphus. Sisyphus is sentenced to labor for all eternity. By contrast, you and I will retire some day, not to mention die. That sounds like cold consolation, but according to Oliver Burkeman, the fact that we are only given one finite lifetime—about 4,000 weeks—should come as good news. Confronting our radical finitude, giving up fantasies about forever clearing our email inbox or getting every student to read the assigned texts, we are freed to focus on what matters most. A person’s life is precious because it is only one, as Mary Oliver also suggests. And don’t forget that we—unlike Sisyphus—have at least a 50/50 chance of exiting this world while we are ascending.
To read Jason’s other recent posts on existentialism and vocation, please check out “‘Voxistential’ Crises and Grappling with the Dark Side of Vocation,” “‘A Mission from God’ versus Kierkegaard’s ‘Infinite Why,’” and “Death and Taxes and a Meaningful Life,” as well as Bonnie Miller-McLemore’s post, “Follow Your Bliss? Bad Advice for Calling,” and her interview on NetVUE’s podcast Callings, “The Double Edge of Calling.”
Jason Mahn is professor of religion and director of the Presidential Center for Faith and Learning at Augustana College, Rock Island, IL. His essay “The Conflict in Our Callings: The Anguish (and Joy) of Willing Several Things” appeared in Vocation Across the Academy: A New Vocabulary for Higher Education (Oxford 2017). He has recently authored Neighbor Love through Fearful Days: Finding Meaning and Purpose in a Time of Crisis (Fortress 2021), co-edited So That All May Flourish: The Aims of Lutheran Higher Education (Fortress 2023), and contributed to The Christian Century. For other posts by Jason, click here.
