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Why Quit So Soon?
As the year came to a close, I sat with Christmas leftovers on Boxing Day, reflecting on my life. I realised I wasn’t happy – not because I hated my job, but because I had sacrificed too much of myself for it.
Before starting full-time employment, I worked on things I enjoyed. I loved doing creative things – reading, writing, playing guitar – often doing one of the other for months without ever getting bored. I would wake up excited to pick up a book or to finally finish writing that song I was working on. These were some of the very few undertakings that put me in that magical elusive flow state, where whole afternoons felt like a few minutes.
And then, I started my job. And despite it being underpaid, the work itself was not bad – It was somewhat interesting and provided a good platform to progress in a career. But only a month into it, that nagging existential dread started to sweep in. I became keenly aware that my identity was slowly morphing into the identity of the role. I worked over 55 hours every week and every night when I got home, I was exhausted, only with enough time for dinner and sleep. I rarely read and hadn’t picked up the guitar since the beginning of the job.
After some reflection, I convinced myself that it was all fine. After all, we all have to make sacrifices, and life is not always dandelions and kittens. I figured this is what everyone is expected to do, that I simply had to grow up and get over not being able to do those things I loved. Sacrifices have to be made, and so like any hard-working member of society, I convinced myself to pull my socks up and get on with it.
That fateful Christmas, I happened to be reading Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus. The famous fable tells the story of the cunning king Sisyphus who upon capturing Death and cheating his way back from the underworld, was punished by the gods to spend an eternity rolling a massive boulder up a hill, only to watch it roll back down each time he nears the summit. In his book, Camus argues that life is no different from Sisyphus’ punishment: whatever we choose to do, we will never be any different than Sisyphus rolling his boulder.
Any attempt to condense 200 pages of a profound existential piece of writing will always fall short of the mark, and I encourage any reader to pick up a copy of the book (and other works by Camus, especially The Stranger). In essence, the universe is so vast and unyielding that it can never provide satisfactory answers to questions relating to meaning or purpose of life. Whatever we do, we will always face an indifferent universe. You will die, followed by the rest of society, and in the end, earth, or at least the materials it is made of, will be nothing but a cloud of dust among an infinite cloud of dust. Fun, right?
Camus’ other works dive into other elements of absurdism. One element related to this post deals with societal constructs and expectations. In his book, The Stranger, the protagonist realises that life is made up of strange concocted social constructs that we as members of society accept without question. He begins to question these constructs before eventually realising that these constructs, despite oiling the cogs of modern society, are mostly oppressive.
