a.k.a. V.J.

“One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

– Albert Camus

The first quarter of the year has been laborious for me. It always is. There is an annual project at my job that starts in the fall and wraps up in late February or early March. I’m writing this the day after putting said project to bed for 2024.

The last month of the project is normally pretty hectic, and that also coincides with the most time-intensive part of the spring semester at my teaching job. Suffice it to say, I have been keeping busy.

In the past, I would sometimes start to feel sorry for myself or put-upon during those really busy periods. These days, I feel a little thankful. The truth is that I would much rather have too much to do than too little. That’s partly due to a change of perspective that developed during the COVID lockdowns when I found myself going a bit stir-crazy and missing a daily routine. Mostly, though, I think the change is due to my age and stage in life. Now that my kids are adults and retirement is close enough to at least contemplate, I’ve developed a healthy fear of sinking into uselessness.

That’s not to say that I’ve turned into a workaholic or a narrow careerist. I enjoy my down time and work-life balance as much as anyone. But I also have a need to feel engaged; to know that people are counting on me for something, no matter how small; and to feel like I’m contributing to something beyond myself. I need to be useful. For most of my adult life, the expectation of usefulness was thrust upon me, whether I wanted it or not. I’m now at the point in life where I could theoretically start slipping into post middle-age indolence. I see people in the wider world, some younger than myself, who seem to have done just that, and the prospect kind of horrifies me.

Zookeepers provide the animals in their care with what they call “enrichment activities.” The idea is to present the animals with challenges to keep them mentally occupied. For example, they might present food in such a way that the animal has to work for it a little bit. This is supposed to keep the creatures happier. People need that sort of thing too. I can’t help but think that some of the increase in mental-health issues in our society is due to how little some people are required to leave the house and engage with the routine ups and downs of what used to be daily life. We weren’t built to experience the universe through a phone.

It’s a paradox. In any given moment, if we are presented with two options, we will normally gravitate towards the easier one. It’s human nature to seek the path of least resistance. For example, if you wouldn’t suffer any negative consequences and you were given the choice one morning of going to your job and working 9 to 5 OR staying home and watching Netflix on the couch all day, you’d probably pick the latter. I certainly would. But if you had the opportunity to make a choice like that every single day over a long period of time, and always picked the path of least resistance, where would you be? Who would want to be the person who looked back over their life for the past decade and realized that they mostly spent it watching TV (or arguing with people on social media, or playing mobile games, etc.) while the outside world marched on and barely noticed their absence?

Increasingly, it feels like a mountain of algorithms, AI, and other forces in modern society are constantly nudging us toward making the choices that are easy in the short-term but bad for us in the long-term. It’s almost like we are being subtly herded toward mass uselessness. It’s possible to escape the trap, but we have to want to do it. We have to become our own zookeepers, so to speak.

For my part, I’m trying to do some little things to avoid mental/social atrophy. I’ve been reading a lot more. I occasionally go into the office on days when I’m scheduled to work from home. I walk every day that the weather allows. I’m always looking for opportunities to get out of the house and run errands. An outsider would never call my life exciting, but it is fully booked. At the end of the day, I am like Albert Camus’ vision of Sisyphus — I know that rolling the boulder up the hill every day is futile, but I’m ultimately just happy to have something to do.