In Greek mythology, Sisyphus was condemned to push a rock up a hill for all eternity.
His struggle serves as a metaphor for the pursuit of meaning in a seemingly meaningless world.
Left alone, this is a nihilistic picture.
But, Albert Camus suggested another way of looking at it with his famous quote: ‘One must imagine Sisyphus happy’.
Camus suggests that Sisyphus’s eternal struggle can also encourage us to embrace the present moment and enjoy the process.
He said ‘the struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart’.
You don’t even need an outcome. You don’t need anything, only to accept things as they are and work from there.
If ‘life lessons’ were a person, they’d be Jurgen Klopp. And it seems he was on board with this idea.
Klopp’s philosophy of football, so to say, is situationist: “This is how it is”. How many times have we heard that? “This is how we stand; we take it from here”. Everyone is responsible for the game on Klopp’s pitch. You influence the destiny of a game by how you stand, run, watch, react, create an occasion, or restrain to shoot. You are responsible for any possible world of the ball — Oana Serban
Focus will be the next big thing.
I’m as much of a slave to my phone as anyone.
But I feel I’m missing out, ironically, by being on it.
I’ve always believed that if AI came and took over and we ever get to the stage of being mere avatars, having neuro-link chips in our brain, I’ll be checking out.
It’s insane.
Believing you have a chip in your brain is literally a symptom of psychosis.
And what is the definition of psychosis only losing touch with reality.
And I don’t think ‘optimisation’ or ‘convenience’ could ever be good enough excuses to dispense with reality.
I tell myself I’d rather touch grass and start a vinyl collection in rebellion.
But then, I haven’t checked out yet — I still indulge in the guilty pleasure of a Mr Ballen clip on YouTube.
At some point, we’ll surely have to draw the line.
We’ve already lost a significant chunk of our ability to focus.
I wouldn't want to lose it completely.
As we’re heading that way, it seems to be a cheat code to success.
My prediction is that the most successful will be those who can focus best.
That being said, it’s difficult to focus when Oasis are on the cusp of announcing a comeback.
The Violent Language Of The Weekend
I wrote this poetry in June:
She came down in a dressing gown, face pale as the news, and I couldn’t do much despite my three degrees and the thirty it was outside.
On the surface, in Richmond Avenue, this family didn’t want for anything.
But, as the rotted door creaked open, which I’d had to slide past with the rucksack swaying on my back, one full of notepads and tick boxes she didn’t want to know about, I was left thinking of all they’d wanted for — the answer? A lot, and for the pain to stop.
So then Friday ended and I parked it as suddenly as they crashed. I went to Thorpe Park, had a blast, and got thrown around a lot too.
But why can’t the language for creativity be the language of regeneration? You killed that poem, we say. You’re a killer. You came into that novel guns blazing. I am hammering this paragraph, I am banging them out, we say. I owned that workshop. I shut it down. I crushed them. We smashed the competition. I’m wrestling with the muse. The state, where people live, is a battleground state. The audience a target audience. “Good for you, man” a man once said to me at a party, “you’re making a killing with poetry. You’re knockin’ em dead― Ocean Vuong
These are things that create a life.
Everything was so violent; the end-of-bed view, the creaking bedframe, the blackout curtains blowing in the wind both let in a day and kept the night black together. Then we attacked our insides with too much to eat, too much broccoli, kale in our smoothies, and a hash brown… hashtag — I don’t like going home so soon on Sundays.
So then I wrote words like these in Starbucks and a father came in with his son. Like a few weeks ago, they came by motorcycle, the danger, the tattoos, the son reading a real book and I thought: I’m getting to that violent age too.
There’s more poetry where that came from.
Cool Closing Words
People die a thousand times to get to who they are — The Lumineers