Sisyphus, Meme Culture, and the Human Condition

This musing is based on a conversation I had with a friend of mine over lunch.

The myth goes that the Greek king Sisyphus was punished for cheating death by being forced to roll an immense boulder up a hill, only for it to roll back down every time it reached the top. This would go on forever, leaving Sisyphus to engage in an eternity of laborious and frustrating work.

Sisyphus may not be real, but his impact on our culture and language most definitely is. His task is so representative of the futile and repetitive that the word Sisyphean is used to describe such activities. But beyond his entry into our daily vocabulary, Sisyphus has proven himself to be exceedingly relatable; there is no better signifier of this than the recent Sisyphus meme that has cropped up.

Sisyphus: The Man, the Myth, the Meme

It's died down a lot by the time of writing, but recently there has been a meme wherein an image of Sisyphus rolling a boulder up a mountain is overlaid on a video of someone or something engaging in a Sisyphean task. Examples include a Roomba set up to leave a trail of dust behind it, or someone trying to open a plastic packaging cutter encased in hard plastic.

I believe that it is that these memes are relatable to us living in the modern world that makes them funny and enjoyable. One can look at Sisyphus and feel that they, too, are stuck in a menial or futile cycle in some way. This has been elaborated on in the meme's evolution, with a personal favorite derivative of mine being the "If you can scroll, you can roll!" sign being hung up in a hypothetical workplace.

One must imagine the Ancient Greeks making memes

The Sisyphus meme is definitely a modern take on the idea of futility, which is a concept as old as time. But the idea that he's a relatable character is most definitely not a new one. Humans have been turning their frustrations into jokes for as long as we've had the ability to joke, and I can't help but imagine that the person who coined the term Sisyphean was at least a little bit tongue-in-cheek. Surely even the ancient Greeks must have felt at least a little bit connected to Sisyphus.

My point is that I feel that there will always be a tendency for people to, at least some of the time, make light of the mundane and annoying parts of life. Along with the recent Sisyphus meme, it seems that in the past few years there has been a trend towards memes deriving their humor through relatability to those less pleasant situations. I'm sure that this is a tendency that's as old as humanity itself, but I'm quite amused with memes being its latest incarnation.

In any case, it seems we're doomed to continue not just living through shitty situations, but also to joke about them for the rest of eternity. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.