Sisyphus Didn’t Have an Apple Watch
Sisyphus didn’t have an Apple Watch tracking his steps, reminding him to stand, or congratulating him for his climb. There were no rings to close, no streaks to protect, no passive-aggressive nudges to breathe. He had a rock — and that was enough.
He pushed it, and it fell. He pushed it again. The terms were brutal, but at least they were clear. His sentence was repetition. Ours is repetition with notifications.
We, however, live under a different curse: optimization. Our boulders come prepackaged as features. We do not simply push — we log, quantify, gamify, and then scroll Twitter in the moments between. We don’t resist our sentence — we upgrade it, subscribe to it, sync it across devices.
Sisyphus labored in silence. His torment was mythic, but honest. Our labor is constantly interrupted by notifications from mindfulness apps. Our struggle is not with absurdity — it is with distraction dressed as progress. The pain of pushing a rock is different than the subtle ache of never arriving.
You may not push a rock uphill, but perhaps you check your email first thing in the morning. You don’t descend the mountain — you refresh your feed. The climb never ends, but it’s not because you’re cursed. It’s because you’ve subscribed to infinite loops disguised as achievement. The inbox repopulates. The steps reset. The dopamine wears off.
Unlike Sisyphus, we celebrate our labor. We screenshot it. We filter it. We push and climb not toward awareness, but toward metrics — likes, shares, KPIs, steps, burned calories. And at the end of the day, the reward is another digital badge. Another prompt. Another hill.
Sisyphus didn’t track his VO2 max. He didn’t need a recovery score. No metrics informed him of his readiness to resume. His readiness was irrelevant — the gods did not care. The algorithm, however, pretends to care deeply. It smiles at you in haptics. It pushes notifications titled “Just checking in.”
You are not free when your labor is constantly measured. You are not free when your rest must be logged. You are not free when silence is so foreign that you need white noise to simulate it.
Perhaps Sisyphus was freer than we are. He knew the task, and he knew it was absurd. There was no illusion of productivity, no curated feed of other boulder-pushers with shinier stones and better form. He was condemned, but not deluded. His rock was real. His struggle, felt. He didn’t need a daily affirmation.
We, on the other hand, mistake our metrics for meaning. We confuse visibility for value. We wear our suffering like a smart device — tightly fitted, always charged, always pinging.
So yes, imagine Sisyphus happy — but do not imagine him connected.
Imagine him unmeasured.
Imagine him aware.
And then ask yourself: if you could remove the watch, the feed, the need to be seen — would you still climb?
Would you still push?
Would you know what you’re pushing?
Maybe then the absurd becomes clarity. Not a curse, but a chance to start over, quietly.
No data. No sync. Just the rock. And you.