Losing, and regaining, meaning in the era of coronavirus
What does Albert Camus’s philosophical classic, The Myth of Sisyphus, reveal about the status of our lives with Covid-19?
In The Myth of Sisyphus (https://www.britannica.com/topic/The-Myth-of-Sisyphus), Camus addresses a cluster of philosophical questions about how to appraise our lives, including whether life is worth living, how life is absurd and what could make life meaningful. Camus answers these questions by reflecting on the image of Sisyphus, a mythic figure from ancient Greece.
Sisyphus had treated some of the gods disrespectfully, and so Zeus, the king of the Greek gods, punished him by having him roll a heavy stone up a large hill for eternity. Every time Sisyphus got the rock to the top of the hill, it would roll back to the bottom, at which point Sisyphus would roll the rock back to the top, only to see it fall back down again, ad infinitum...
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