The myth of sisyphus as a model for persistence | Ramblin' & Amblin' | Oct 26, 2026

I think it's a more fun view. I am somebody who it's really easy to fall into cynicism and um, cynicism. I always wanted to be a philosopher but much like being a programmer I was told it was impossible because of my grades but you can be an amateur, be an amateur philosopher I've discovered there's a whole lot of people that are supposed to be professionally qualified for the thing that they do and they are in fact not but they do it anyway and uh philosophy seems to be the most popular one in uh the internet at least in my self-selected little hyper curated slice of of the internet and uh one of those those um philosophers that I learned about and I'm gonna actually give a shout out here to the Philosophize This podcast because it's been a tremendous resource for me and in learning um I even uh had their sticker I didn't fund the Patreon for a little while when I had uh had uh income but uh the um Myth of Sisyphus by um oh my gosh um what's his name Albert Camus the Algerian um philosopher existentialist absurdist whatever contemporary of a number of a number of other philosophers whose names I just there's there's there's a woman's name that I just can't remember so I feel bad I'm gonna say sorry I mean um oh my gosh I can't remember the names see this is what I mean I'm no uh Zizek I'm not uh so fluent but the Myth of Sisyph us resonated with me and I think it resonates a lot of people because it talks about the uh um um futility uh of of um self-harm and taking oneself out of the uh the game and that it's none of this is on purpose but um we choose how we are going to embrace this absurdity because it's it's not nihilism where it's just everything has no meaning um um and it's this kind of just state of of of acceptance or just awareness that there is no meaning per se um and that existentialism it's really just yeah we exist what are you gonna do about it and then there's um see I thought it was on like a uh a secret trail no I'm not on the secret trail this is just another trail this is a tremendously beautiful look out I'm gonna bring my kids here see what did Thoreau say the path less traveled it doesn't matter it's about that less traveled by me and that made all the difference but um Albert Camus talks about the myth of Sisyphus and if you don't know Sisyphus he's he is a person who pissed off at gods and they uh punished him by saying you got to push this stupid rock up the stupid hill and when you get up to the stupid top you're going to be at the stupid bottom and you're going to have to do it again so that's it for all eternity he pushes the rock up the hill and then when he turns around at the top he sees he's at the bottom of the hill that he has to push up again and that's how life feels sometimes that life is pointless effort day after day nihilism it has no point wow that drop i think coming up this would be a lot more fun than going down the uh man strength woods is cool this is north of uh veteran acres and um it's connected i'm on the other side of the high tension wires so Sisyphus is pushing the stupid rock up the stupid hill stupid top stupid bottom yeah every day and uh that's it you know like uh i don't remember if there's what happens if he just doesn't push the rock um just ends up sitting there i guess but uh he does it anyway because it's kind of a screw you to the gods you're gonna give me a stupid job i'm gonna do a stupid job i'm gonna do it the best i can and that's the myth is that he goes up he pushes a rock every day he does it and you can choose and here's where albert camus comes in with the absurdism absurdism is that uh you can choose your disposition to this just like Sisyphus can you get up every day and you gotta do whatever bullshit you gotta do every day and it sucks and it's a drag and oftentimes there's times when there's nothing to look forward to except more pushing that rock up the hill you know not dolly parton singing nine to five and she had had enough of it too you know but you gotta some while the kitchen and uh you know get to work um so yeah so albert camus says all right and and of course you know he's far more articulate and articulate and then i am and uh i'm repeating what somebody else observed but they were observing something that somebody had said thousands of years prior there's nothing new under the sun except our own personal responses to it but even those are ingrained into us by forces that we had very little say in um so absurd you embrace the absurdity of it and you be the best rock pusher you possibly can be and you consume yourself with the pushing of the rock with the perfecting of it and uh of finding finding the flow the flow of the rock the roll paying attention to how you place your hands taking your time going as fast as you need to go slow as you need to go you measure it you think about what you're doing you put all of your focus in the perfect roll up the hill and you let that be your existence let that be the way you take what you didn't have maybe a choice in or you didn't realize it was going to be this way or just it's gone on long enough that it's become just feeling like pushing a rock up the hill just like Sisyphus but you take a moment it's the buddhists and the daoists and the zen folks say being at one being present and the experience of whatever it is you're doing regardless of what it is you're doing can you let that guide you and that that ultimately is how I ended up learning a bit about daoism coming back to software craftsmanship and some of the analogies and and metaphors and and tools and concepts like kata's and koan's and you know filling your or emptying your cup things like that learning that those came from daoist philosophy I know it's a religion but it's also philosophy but Albert Camus talked about about that with the myth of Sisyphus and he also talks about Don Quixote and uh and um what's his name um Casanova I think it was um that's uh the Casanova one that didn't really resonate with me so much I can't really remember but it was just it was the Don Quixote one that I remember and kind of clicked with me the most and that was tilting it to windmills and accepting that at least as I understand it there's people that know this up further than I do the uh absurdity of completely committing yourself to something even though you know or I mean you're delusional you have to be delusional and I feel like I was like that with a lot of software engineering stuff I felt like I was kind of a little bit of a Don Quixote or the uh Casanova who just uh embraced the um the process the experience um even though I knew or somehow it kept me going whatever I just knew that every day I would get up and I would be facing a difficult challenge and I would uh try to apply this this mindset that's uh it's as bad as things might feel pointless or futile is it's it's like doing a kata you don't do it because you're going to keep that kata forever you do that because you want to experience the actions in a structure where you can really measure and and spend time on each moment of of that of that sequence of of actions I did this I actually placed first in a uh a kata competition back when I was a black belt when I was younger I do love doing katas but I don't really do them anymore I'm pretty out of shape but um I feel like it's like that rock you know you just it might be pointless but you do it anyway and you do it to the best of your ability and you let that be the thing that keeps you going not the rock but the act of pushing the rock and perfecting that and that the product is the rock in motion and the reset and even when I was skateboarding and I was reteaching myself from my late early 40s mid 40s I would have to kind of talk myself through just how bad it was and how painful it was because I was so out of shape I'd been working sitting for so long you know my pelvis muscles were not as strong I had to relearn how to use my very own body and it hurt oh my god did it hurt but on my board I wrote a message to myself and I looked down and it was something I like when I was trying to ollie over obstacles ollie is you know when you pop your board up and you kind of hop over things but the problem is that your back trucks if they don't come up high enough on the back wheels and they hook on the thing that you were going over well the board's going to stop and you're not and the thing's going to fall and it's going to be all kinds of awkward and that's why I don't really have tendons in my wrists anymore and with skateboarding it was always that way though it was the only thing that matters was to roll away and that's all I concentrated on I would I tried to get myself to not think about the ollie itself and that helps at least it helped me get over the obstacle so sometimes that rock is a lot of fun to push and you do it over and over and over again and every time you're thinking about how to do it better how to do it better how to get locked in how to pull my foot up how to pop it just right how to time it how to go fast enough how to go slow enough the distance when do I when do I push when do I like none of those are the ollie none of those are a trick for anybody else to go I was in a parking lot by myself but I knew that's what I had to do if I ever wanted to go to the park and skate with other people and then you go to the park and you do the same thing except there's other people there and they're doing the two and then you get to watch them and that's fun so maybe maybe Sisyphus just needed a few more people pushing rocks up so they could trade notes and hype each other up one got up to the top of the hill the other are watching everybody claps slaps the rock just like skaters on the half pipe slapping their tail on the coping it's the best feeling in the world yep Myth of Sisyphus Albert Camus push the rock Kaizen all right thanks bye