No sun without shadow

You’re probably familiar with the story of Sisyphus. You know, the Greek myth where a king is given the eternal punishment of rolling a large boulder up a hill, only for it to roll back to the bottom every time.

It became a never-ending task. And today we usually call something ‘Sisyphean’ when we mean repetitive, senseless work.

But one of my favourite philosophers, Camus, once wrote “Human living is a Sisyphean task.”

For Camus, rolling the stone up the hill and seeing it roll down again is what challenges us. It’s what helps us grow and flourish. Does that sound odd?

Consider this. We often seek to eliminate pain in life. We’re preoccupied with getting rid of, controlling, or avoiding pain. But instead, whatever we do, pain keeps occurring in our lives. Just like the stone of Sisyphus.

Now, no one wants pain in their life. I certainly don’t. I don’t go out looking for it. But the truth is, living life means living and experiencing struggle, pain, discomfort, difficult memories, and unpleasant emotions.

There’s nothing wrong with wanting to avoid or eliminate pain. But when we spend more time focusing on what we don’t want—rather than what we do—that’s when we have a problem.

Centring your life around avoiding pain means you lose connection to what matters. Life becomes mundane, even meaningless.

To overcome his own challenge, Sisyphus was forced to accept the absurdity of his fate. Such acceptance doesn’t bring pleasure or joy. It’s actually an uncomfortable thought. But acceptance teaches us how to live fully. It shows us that a good life is possible, even when we struggle, as long as we have the strength to fight back against the absurd.

In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus writes, “There is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night.”

Just like happiness is more than the absence of sadness, life is more than the absence of pain.

The human experience involves direction, purpose, and action. It’s about doing something that matters. We need to orient our life around something more meaningful than just alleviating pain.  

And we can achieve this through value-based living.

Orienting your life around what really matters, “even with the pain,” honours that repetitive pain. How?

Think of the people who climb Mt Everest. If you offered them a helicopter ride to the top, do you think they’d accept?

Reaching the top is only meaningful because of the struggle of climbing it. The struggle—the pain—becomes the source of meaning. The journey is valuable because of the effort.

So it’s not the absence of pain that makes life worth living, but the things we care about, like finding meaning, feeling competent, overcoming struggles, and the effort itself, even though there is pain.

You don’t have to go out and look for pain. But when pain visits you, stay open and think twice before you fight it.

A value-driven life gives us a way to deal with our problems and our difficult emotions. It offers a way for a fulfilling, meaningful life, where we do things that align with what matters to us most.

It’s important to accept that many meaningful things—things that make our lives rich and fulfilling—come with some sort of pain: having and raising a child, stressful jobs, school, sports, intimate relationships.

Let’s think about what completely eliminating the pain would really look like. Let’s say you play football on the weekend. You do it because you enjoy it and for you it’s valuable. But while playing you probably get hurt. Or if you lose a game, you might get hurt emotionally.

If you wanted to eliminate all the physical and emotional pain, you’d need to stop playing for good. Every game there’d be a good chance you’ll get hurt. Would you really give up something that adds meaning to your life?

You see, life becomes very boring, even meaningless, without challenging opportunities.

Humans are complicated. Our brains aren’t satisfied with an absence of problems, challenges, or discomfort. We’re wired to appreciate a huge variety of things, many of which don’t come without some form of pain. 

In fact, I’ll let you in on a little secret: we’re not built to be happy! And you can thank evolution for that.

You see, all emotions have adaptive purposes. Pain tells us what’s going wrong, what needs to be changed, what we need, and what we care about. It’s only when pain, or sadness, or shame become chronic and aren’t processed do we have a problem.

In fact, we become less happy when we pursue pleasure and when we force ourselves to be happy. The constant pursuit of happiness actually makes us lonely and depressed. Have a think about that.

This is because we aren’t very good at knowing what actually makes us happy and we pursue happiness in the wrong places, often by setting materialistic goals for ourselves. But that’s a topic for another time.

For now just remember: the pursuit of pleasure and elimination of pain don’t necessarily make us happy. Our values do.