Sisyphus, if you haven’t heard, is the mythological man doomed by Greek gods to forever push a boulder up a hill. As soon as he and the boulder near the top, the boulder slips his grasp, and he must begin anew.
It’s an incredible fate and a flexible metaphor, as it illustrates the concept of having to do something uncomplicated and mundane – like pushing a boulder – forever without rest and without the reward of completion. A “Sisyphean task” is one of my favorite ideas, since our modern lives are beset by dozens of them: doing dishes, clearing out email boxes, paying bills.
We will ourselves to do these tasks because our lives require they be done. It is the cruft of our lives that we clear away so we can do what we really want to do.
This challenge – to manage our will so we can do what needs doing – is an idea I have been preoccupied with for the last few months. The question I have been asking is: Not only how do I stir the will to do the mundane, the Sisyphean, but also how do I do the larger, more complicated things that would clearly benefit me but seem to be overwhelming in the moment?
The question of will, and what drives it, has puzzled every great thinker, likely every average person for all time, and probably you too.
The role of and meaning of will in our lives has changed as our perceived sense of self has changed. For instance, the Greek philosopher Plotinus wrote around 200 AD about whether or not we have free will, or if we are merely compelled by “the gods”. Then, about two hundred years later, Augustine wrote his treatise On Free Choice of the Will, which was concerned about whether or not we choose sin on our own and the process by which individuals choose to be good or evil.
For another 1,500 years Westerners focused on the idea of will as an expression of godliness and their interest in following a path to heaven. A person’s choices were all viewed in terms of whether or not they wanted to be more Christlike.
In America’s earliest days, puritans, such as Thomas Hooker, a clergyman in Connecticut who also wrote the state’s first constitution, were concerned with how a person guides their will so that they reject sin. Desire was dangerous, as it could quickly swerve into passion and earthly sin.
“Appetite is the will’s solicitor,” Hooker wrote in the 1630’s, “and the will is appetite’s controller; what we covet according to the one, by the other we often reject.”
The thinking of the time was, if you have appetite, you need to control it, so you don’t get into trouble. And getting into trouble was to stray from the collective goal, which was religiosity. Everyone in a community – especially in 17th Century Europe and America – was focused on using their will during earthly existence so they could spend their next life in heaven.
A revolution of thinking came 150 years later when Thomas Reid announced a split of will from religious context, allowing for individuals to want simply for the sake of wanting. Reid, who founded the Scottish “common sense” school of thinking, posited that individuals have their own free will and choose to do things for the sake of the actions themselves.
“Will is an ambiguous word, being sometimes put for the faculty of willing; sometimes for the act of that faculty, besides [having] other meanings. But ‘volition’ always signifies the act of willing, and nothing else,” he wrote in Essays on the Active Powers of Man.
This was perhaps the earliest expression of what Freud in the 1920’s termed id, the part of the mind in which instinctive impulses and primary desires manifest.
In Freud’s context, individual desire is split from the collective. We all have things we want and we struggle internally over whether or not to seek them.
Now, 100 years after Freud, Westerners take individual needs and desires for granted. Every aspect of our society begins with the individual, then moves to a struggle between external and individual needs. Marketing messages are the clearest expression of the needs of the self (consider every TV commercial you’ve ever seen and how it focuses on an individual considering a product, this is a singular person considering their needs, not a group together making a decision). Almost every aspect of our society is oriented towards individual demand: our politics, our education, our hobbies. How do we get more out of them for our specific gain and gratification?
As a man of our time, I ask myself: How do I get more out of my life? I want to write more, I want to swim more, I want to find ways to spend time with friends and family I love.
Complicating my desires, I suffer from the ultimate modern malady: Pathological demand avoidance.
Linked to my attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) diagnosis, PDA manifests as an avoidance of everyday demands caused by anxiety. So, I might put off paying bills for months, or maybe not do laundry until the last possible moment or avoid for weeks calling some bureaucratic place to take care of one simple item. Self-made disasters abound.
In the moment, the act of avoiding feels like I am expressing my will but at the same time the avoidance is controlling me. What seems simple to others becomes an overwhelmingly shameful experience– why can’t I just pay the stupid parking ticket – and I lose control over my own will because of my wholly self-manufactured anxiety.
This idea of a deeply complex self, with ongoing internal conflicts that are wholly unknown to others is a completely modern idea. Imagine Hooker or Reid, both of whom were rooted in collective obligations, trying to understand that I can’t just simply will a thing and do it. I have to think it through, consider it, understand how it will benefit me and devise a motivation. “How unbelievably selfish!” they might think.
Now, back to Sisyphus: The myth doesn’t include a discussion of what would happen if he decided to stop pushing the rock up the hill. Because in the ancient Greek mind, the will of the gods was enough to compel anyone to do anything.
Next, consider him again in a modern context: What if Sisyphus, knowing he needed to push the rock up the hill, decided that he’d try to enjoy it? What if he gamified it? What if he created a rock rolling song? (rock’n’roll?) Would it get easier?
A few years ago I had to get an MRI. The technicians warned me that I would have to stay in the machine for 90 minutes, without a break. It was grueling. But I got through it imagining the rhythmic pinging and banging of the MRI as a beat. I challenged myself to sing as many songs to that beat as I could. Somehow, it made the passage of time faster.
Does this qualify as willing myself through the experience?
Again and again, needing to do challenging things, willing ourselves through the experiences, can be mentally and physically exhausting. To manage this, over time I have imagined a context of will being like health points in a video game: You only have so much and when you run out, you need replenishing activities like sleep, time with friends, or gorging chocolate to regain your “will points”.
I’ve gotten good at the idea: There’s only so many difficult things I can do in a row and when I feel like I hit my maximum, I need to take a break. Sometimes these breaks are forced on me: for instance, after a lot of hard thinking and decision making, I feel “brain dead” and can’t do much more than zone out in front of a TV.
Modern science has no good answers to what really works. There’s a widely cited 2010 study
that suggests my idea of a maximum is self-defeating. Stanford professor Veronica Job’s research, “Ego Depletion—Is It All in Your Head?” found that individuals who thought willpower was a limited resource were subject to having their willpower depleted. But people who did not believe willpower was easily exhaustible did not show signs of depletion after exerting self-control. In other words, just do it.
But then, a 2016 follow up study with a way more boring title, “A Multilab Preregistered Replication of the Ego-Depletion Effect” pointed out that Job’s study only had 60 subjects and replicated the research across 23 labs and 2,141 people. It found that the whole framework may be an artifact of experimental design rather than a real psychological phenomenon.
The modern revolution Freud forced onto us is that the unavoidable aggravation of humanity is our mental complexity. This mortal coil we wear is tangled and necessary to every aspect of our being. You have to address it to do anything significant.
Plotinus, Augustine, Reid, and anyone who seeks a veneer of simplicity want us to imagine that we can ignore our internal voices and just do the thing. And yet…those internal voices, the demand avoidance, gamification, singing through a task, they cannot be ignored. We do get brain dead. But by understanding ourselves, perhaps we can extend ourselves just a little bit more.
Maybe a modern Sisyphus would have whistled while he worked.
Other things I’m thinking about.
The greatest picture of a pope of all time.
Michael McDonald had a kid at 14, gave him up for adoption and was just recently reunited. Amazing.
The US beef industry is broken. Prices are high and likely to stay that way for a long time.
Semi-trucks don’t have a list price. Prices are negotiated and therefore nobody really knows how much a semi should cost. California is about to change that.
Map of every lighthouse in the world.
London has the Elizabeth Line. Shenzhen has Line 14. Every city should have a high-speed local line that cuts through the city.
The US has thousands of small, untended dams that are wrecking nature. We need to raise money to get rid of them.