Sisyphus was the king of Corinth and a man who played the gods. When the god of death came to take his life, Sisyphus tricked him by asking his wife not to bury him. Once in the underworld, he wept to Persephone that his wife had not honoured him and she allowed him to return to the world to seek his revenge. He never came back. When he was finally caught, Hades chose to punish him for his deceit: Sisyphus was made to roll a boulder up a hill for eternity. Whenever he reached the top, the boulder would roll back down, trapping him in an unending loop. This mythological story was used by Albert Camus in ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’ to capture the philosophy of the absurd.  

Camus argues that every time Sisyphus rolls the boulder back up, he is fully aware that it is entirely futile and that, in the end, it will roll back down. This is the absurd situation of life. Camus’ argument is that we must ‘imagine Sisyphus happy’ in his absurd pursuit, just as we must imagine ourselves happy in the absurdity of our own human lives. 

Camus wrote this before smart phones were ever a thought. But what can we learn about our own ‘doom scrolling’ from Sisyphus’ eternal ‘boulder rolling’? 

Before the 2020 pandemic, words like ‘doom scrolling’, ‘brain rot’ or ‘chronically online’ had little to no meaning. The pandemic gave rise to TikTok, Reels, and YouTube Shorts, all adversaries to our attention span And soon our digital lives began to echo Sisyphus’ absurd situation.

Feeling sleepy, eyes half closed, but the thought lingers in mind: “just one more reel”, and before you know it, it’s morning. The gods who assigned this punishment to Sisyphus, in our case, are the ever-changing algorithm that keeps you hooked. This algorithm provides us with dopamine hits like no other source. Thus, we become stuck in a never-ending loop scrolling, knowing that the next reel is probably going to be as ‘brain rotted’ as usual. 

Just like Sisyphus, we are fully aware of the cycle we are getting into; numerous articles, both on this platform and others, with research and studies backing their claims, mention the harmful effects of doom-scrolling and the dependence on reels for dopamine. Despite knowing the absurdity of it, the algorithms have us hooked. They follow a Variable-ratio reward schedule, the same technique used in casinos, which keeps us addicted. You never know whether the next reel is going to be fruitful or another AI slop. The uncertainty of this reward keeps us going, snaring us, keeping us addicted. But, forgive the personal viewpoint, I believe that is another excuse to leave what is attractive yet harmful.

However, there is a major difference between Sisyphus’s situation and our own. The reason Camus sought to consider Sisyphus happy was his total acceptance of absurdity. He realized his punishment was for eternity, was aware that his efforts would bear no fruit; still, he was determined to roll the boulder all the way to the top. The escape for Sisyphus is accepting the absurdity of his task and doing it anyway. For us, the escape cookies through recognising the absurdity of scrolling and choosing not to do it. No matter how powerful the algorithms are, the power to click away is always in our hands; the dependency on reels for dopamine is a choice, not a necessity

If one must imagine Sisyphus happy to make sense of his own absurdity, perhaps one must recognise that this endless scrolling is no source of happiness to the modern human. Understanding this might offer a way out of the addictive algorithms we find ourselves in.