Blog 5: The Question

There is one huge question or counter argument that I am finding in my research of the meaning of life. The question-Is life meaningless? The best example I found came from “The Truth about the World,” by James and Stuart Rachels. The story in the book is that of Sisyphus. The way the myth was told in the book has Sisyphus telling an eternal secret of the gods to mortals. The gods then punished Sisyphus by making him roll a rock up a hill for eternity. Every time Sisyphus made it towards the top of the hill, the rock would roll back down and he was forced to start over again. This punishment was to continue on for eternity. The reason for this story was to show how harsh a meaningless life can be. An argument against the story was that it was cruel because of the hard labor of pushing a big rock, but the book says imagine the big rock as the size of a pebble and every time he got towards the top with the pebble it fell back down the hill and he had to start again. Now the theory of the hard labor is gone. The other argument against this story was the he wasn’t doing something that he wanted to do. Now imagine that the gods gave Sisyphus an obsession for rolling stones, so he not only liked rolling the stone, but he felt it was his life work. As the book says “he was never frustrated or concerned.” Nothing has changed from the original scenario other than Sisyphus’ view on rolling the stones. The work itself is just as meaningless. You still feel bad for him because his no meaning. He is not working towards anything and he is never finished. I loved this story because if a person who is suicidal feels there life has no meaning like Sisyphus’, then I could understand why they would want to do it. It also gives good insight into what a meaningless life is and it shows that most of us have a meaningful life. I think that I will end up tying this into the happiness part of my story, because there are other directions that the meaningless life theory can go in as well.