Sisyphus Over Suicide

Pierce Thompson recounts his struggles with a sense of failure and meaninglessness, including hospitalization for attempted suicide. Pierce describes how, reading Albert Camus’s The Stranger, he came to find solace, ironically, by facing life’s inherent absurdity. In particular, Thompson lauds Camus’s depiction of Sisyphus’s eternal task of repeatedly pushing a boulder up a hill not as a symbol of life’s futility (as it is often invoked as being), but as an embrace of a sense of purposefulness in an absurd world.