One Must Imagine Sysyphus Sad Sometimes
Philippe Beaudoin · January 25, 2026
You may have heard the classic Camus quote: “One must imagine Sysiphus happy”. This staple of absurdism invites us to reflect on meaning-making in a life where nothing external will give us an objective goal. I think it’s something useful to be reminded of. Not constantly, but at least every now and then. So that we never forget that all the goals we’ve ever thought of as important were dreamt of by humans just like us.
But there’s something about the image of Sysyphus rolling an ever-falling rock up a hill that just strikes me as… insensitive.
For even though I believe we are trapped in a world where our desire for meaning will not be fulfilled by some external guiding light, I also feel we are not going in circles. We are constantly growing in some direction. Taking three steps forward and two steps back. One step forward and a hundred steps back. And sometimes a thousand unexpected steps forward.
Each of us stepping up or dropping our boulder. Striving up the hill of what-feels-good-to-us with all the dramatic turns imposed by our human condition. We strive up yet sometimes get lost, noticing we landed on a path we threaded before.
We get bored, we feel stagnant, we realize we dropped the boulder somewhere along the way. We are sometimes tempted to give up the climb. Yet we also sometimes find the courage to look for the boulder, pick it back up, and start climbing again.
If we’re Sysyphus, we’re a version of him whose facing an infinite hill with ever novel landscapes to discover. Sysyphus who drops the boulder sometimes and feels pissed when he does. For he knows there is no final objective, yet there always is a way up. He knows dropping the boulder means he’ll have to revisit places he thought he had grown out of…
It’s OK to imagine Sysiphus is sad sometimes. In fact, I believe we must imagine that his intermittent sadness is what keeps his inner-fire alive. Without Sysyphus’s periodic bouts of “Fuck that boulder bullshit!”, the climb itself would feel boring to him. It would feel boring to us watching him and realizing we are faced with a similar infinite climb.
Yes, us, watching him.
Because if one must imagine that Sysyphus is sometimes happy and sometimes sad, one must not imagine him alone.
One must imagine Sysyphus surrounded by million of others like him following different paths up the same infinite mountain. Others who see his sadness, help him pick his boulder back up, and paint for him the picture of the vistas to come. Up, up, up the infinite mountain with infinitely many beautiful landscapes to discover.