One Must Imagine Me Happy

A note before we start. Camus opens his book on this subject with the word suicide, and so, in a sense, does this essay. I am asking the question as a philosophical one, from a comfortable chair, and that is how the essay treats it. If, for you, the question has stopped being philosophical, please do not read a blog about it. Talk to someone: a friend, a doctor, or a helpline. In Switzerland, La Main Tendue answers on 143, day and night. In India, the government’s Tele-MANAS line is 14416. Nothing below is more important than that sentence.

For most of my life I knew exactly what to do next, because someone had set an exam.

The system I grew up in is very good at this. There is always a next thing: the board exam, the entrance exam, the rank, the college, the degree, the scholarship, the thesis, the job. Each one is hard, each one is clearly defined, and each one arrives with a result, a number on a sheet of paper, that tells you whether you have done well. If you are the kind of child who is good at exams, and I was, you learn very early that happiness comes in a particular shape. It is the shape of a result. You work, you wait, the result comes, and for a day or a week you feel wonderful. Then there is a next thing.

I finished my master’s and took my first job at CERN, which, for someone who had spent his whole life aiming at things, was the sort of place you aim at. It was prestigious. It was, in the language of my upbringing, an accomplishment, and I felt the old warm glow of a result arriving.

And then something happened that I was not prepared for, because nothing in my training had prepared me for it. I was not a student any more. There was no next exam. For the first time in my life I had evenings that belonged to nobody, weekends with no deadline behind them, a salary that paid for a decent life and a little more, and what everyone calls work-life balance. I had the balance. I discovered that I did not know what the life half was for.

It did not arrive as a crisis. It arrived as a quiet, persistent question, usually on Sunday evenings. I had spent thirty years learning how to earn a life. Nobody had ever taught me how to live one.

I had spent thirty years learning how to earn a life. Nobody had ever taught me how to live one.

Camus, as it happens, described the moment exactly, in 1942, in a book written by a man younger than I am now. “Rising, streetcar, four hours in the office or the factory, meal, streetcar, four hours of work, meal, sleep, and Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday and Saturday according to the same rhythm.” That, he says, is how most of us live most of the time, and it is easy to follow. “But one day the ‘why’ arises and everything begins in that weariness tinged with amazement.”1From The Myth of Sisyphus, in Justin O’Brien’s 1955 English translation, which is the one quoted throughout this essay. Camus had a streetcar. I had Sunday evenings. The question was the same.

This essay is my attempt to answer it properly. I am thirty-two, I have a decent job and a decent salary, and the question is simply this: now that I can support myself, why should I keep going, and what for? I did not find the answer quickly. I looked for it, over several years, in the obvious places: in achievement, in books, in other people. I found it, as far as I have found it at all, in an unlikely place: an essay about a Greek king condemned to push a rock up a hill forever, by a French-Algerian writer who died in a car crash at forty-six.

But I did not get there directly, and I do not think anyone should. So this essay takes the long way. It starts with why arriving at a goal feels so much flatter than it should, and what the brain is doing when that happens. It goes through what therapy has learned about emotions, which for people like me turned out to be the missing subject. It takes a tour of what philosophers from Athens to Kurukshetra have said about happiness and purpose. And only then does it come to Camus, his four absurd heroes and Sisyphus at the bottom of his hill. At the end, I will try to say honestly what I have kept.

I am an engineer, not a psychologist or a philosopher. I have tried to stick to things I could check, and where the science is disputed, which on this subject is often, I say so. But this essay is also the most personal I have written, and on the personal parts I can only tell you what happened to me.

The exam that never came

Start with the thing that confused me most: why did getting what I wanted feel so thin?

The arrival fallacy

The psychologist Tal Ben-Shahar, who taught one of Harvard’s most popular courses on happiness, gave the experience a name: the arrival fallacy. It is the belief that when we reach a certain destination, we will be happy there. We are, for a moment. Then we find that the destination is only a place, and that we have brought ourselves with us.

Ben-Shahar describes it from his own life. He had worked towards a squash championship for years, won it, and was surprised to find that the happiness lasted a few hours. Most people who have worked for something have a version of that story. The strange thing is not that it happens once. It is that it keeps happening, and we keep being surprised by it. We finish the degree, get the job, move to the city, buy the thing, and each time some part of us expects this to be the one that finally sticks.

For a good student, the fallacy is not a mistake. It is the operating system. The whole of school is organised as a sequence of arrivals, each promising that the real life starts after it. After the board exams you can relax. After the entrance exam you can enjoy yourself. After the degree you will have time. After the first job you will be settled. The promise is always one step ahead, and because it is always one step ahead, it is never tested. And then one day there are no more steps, and you test it, and it does not hold.

The treadmill

In 1971 two psychologists, Philip Brickman and Donald Campbell, proposed that people live on what they called a hedonic treadmill. Good things and bad things happen to us, our mood goes up or down, and then, more or less, it comes back to where it was. We adapt. The pay rise becomes the salary; the new flat becomes the flat; the job at the famous laboratory becomes the job.

In 1978 Brickman and two colleagues published the study that made the idea famous. They interviewed people who had won large sums in the Illinois state lottery, people who had been paralysed in accidents, and a control group, and found that the lottery winners were not much happier than the controls a year or so later, and took less pleasure in ordinary things. The paralysed participants were less happy than the controls, but less unhappy than most people would predict.

The study is quoted everywhere, and it deserves a professor’s interruption.

What the research does suggest, fairly consistently, is that we adapt fastest to things: possessions, salaries, circumstances that stop changing. We adapt more slowly, or not at all, to experiences that keep changing and to the people we are close to. That distinction will turn out to matter.

Money

Since I have mentioned a salary, the obvious question is whether a bigger one would have helped. The answer is more interesting than yes or no, and the way scientists got to it is one of my favourite stories in the whole field.

In 2010 the psychologist Daniel Kahneman, who had won the Nobel in economics, and the economist Angus Deaton, who would win it five years later, published a study of about 450,000 responses to a Gallup survey of Americans. They separated two things we usually lump together: how people evaluate their lives when asked to think about them, and how they feel day to day. Life evaluation kept rising with income. But everyday emotional wellbeing, how much joy and how little stress people reported the previous day, seemed to stop rising at about $75,000 a year. Money bought a better story about your life, but beyond a point it did not buy better days.

In 2021 a younger researcher, Matthew Killingsworth, published a study using a phone app that asked people how they were feeling at random moments, and found the opposite: happiness kept rising with income, with no plateau. Two serious studies disagreed. In most fields, what follows is a decade of sniping. Instead, Kahneman and Killingsworth sat down together, with a third psychologist, Barbara Mellers, acting as a kind of referee, in what scientists call an adversarial collaboration, and reanalysed the data. Their joint paper, in 2023, found that both of them had been partly right. For most people, happiness does keep rising with income. But for the least happy fifth of people, it rises up to about $100,000 and then stops. Beyond that point, more money does not reduce their misery, because their misery is not about money.

I find that result clarifying, and a little uncomfortable. It says that if you are unhappy for reasons that have nothing to do with money, a higher salary will not reach them. It also says that most people who are unhappy about something other than money already know it. I did.

If you are unhappy for reasons that have nothing to do with money, a higher salary will not reach them.

The good student’s problem

There is a deeper reason why the end of school can feel like falling off a cliff, and psychology has a name for that too.

In the 1970s two psychologists at the University of Rochester, Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, began working on what became self-determination theory. Their central distinction is between intrinsic motivation, doing something because it is interesting or satisfying in itself, and extrinsic motivation, doing it for a reward, a grade, approval or to avoid punishment. Over decades of research they argued that people flourish when three basic needs are met: autonomy, the sense that your actions are your own; competence, the sense that you are good at something; and relatedness, the sense of being connected to other people.

A good student is usually rich in competence and poor in autonomy. Everything is excellent, and almost nothing is chosen. The syllabus is set, the exams are set, the path is set, and the rewards, the marks, the ranks, the parents’ pride, come from outside. None of that is a tragedy. It is how most education works, and it produced a great many doctors and engineers. But it trains a very particular reflex: to feel good when someone else tells you that you have done well.

The most famous experiment in this area was done with children and felt-tip pens. In 1973 Mark Lepper, David Greene and Richard Nisbett went into a nursery school and picked out children who liked drawing. Some were told they would get a certificate with a gold seal and a ribbon if they drew; others drew without being promised anything. A week or two later, the researchers watched how much the children chose to draw in free time. The children who had been promised and given the reward drew noticeably less than before. Being paid to do something they already loved had turned it, a little, into work.2Mark Lepper, David Greene and Richard Nisbett, “Undermining Children’s Intrinsic Interest with Extrinsic Reward”, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1973. The effect, called the overjustification effect, has been debated since, especially over whether it applies to tasks people did not enjoy to begin with, but its core has held up reasonably well.

That is the good student’s problem in a sentence. After twenty years of gold seals, the drawing itself is hard to enjoy. I was, and to a large extent still am, programmed to find happiness when something is accomplished and someone notices. What I did not have, when the noticing stopped, was any inner sense of happiness that did not depend on it.

Two famous crises

I have been comforted, if that is the word, to learn that this is an old problem, and that it has happened to people much cleverer than me.

In 1826 John Stuart Mill was twenty years old. He had been educated by his father as a sort of experiment: Greek at three, Latin at eight, logic and political economy before his teens. He was probably the most thoroughly trained young mind in Europe, and he had devoted himself to a single goal, reforming the world along utilitarian lines. In his Autobiography, he describes what happened one autumn. “It occurred to me to put the question directly to myself: ‘Suppose that all your objects in life were realized; that all the changes in institutions and opinions which you are looking forward to, could be completely effected at this very instant: would this be a great joy and happiness to you?’ And an irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered, ‘No!’”

Mill fell into a depression that lasted months. What brought him out of it is the part that matters for this essay. It was not an argument. He was reading a memoir by the French writer Jean-François Marmontel and came to a passage about the death of Marmontel’s father, and he wept. He had not known he could. Later, he found that the poetry of Wordsworth gave him what his education had not: “a source of inward joy,” as he put it, a “culture of the feelings”. The most rigorously educated man of his century was rescued by discovering that he had emotions.

Fifty years later, at about fifty, Leo Tolstoy had already written War and Peace and Anna Karenina. He was rich, famous, healthy, loved and in the middle of a working life most writers would kill for. In A Confession he describes how a question began to stop him in his tracks. “Very well; you will have six thousand desyatinas of land in Samara province and three hundred horses, and what then?” And, of his fame: “Very well; you will be more famous than Gogol or Pushkin or Shakespeare or Molière, or than all the writers in the world, and what of it?” He had no answer, and for a while he hid the rope so as not to be tempted to use it.

I am neither Mill nor Tolstoy. But it helped me enormously to learn that the question I was asking on Sunday evenings in Geneva was not a personal defect. It is what happens, very often, to people who have been extremely good at reaching goals, when they reach them.

Is it just my age?

One more piece of evidence, handled with care. For about twenty years, economists have argued about the so-called U-curve of happiness: the finding, in survey after survey across many countries, that life satisfaction tends to be fairly high in youth, falls through the twenties and thirties, bottoms out somewhere in the late forties, and rises again into old age. The economist David Blanchflower, who has done more than anyone to document it, put the low point, across 145 countries, at around forty-seven or forty-eight.

Other researchers argue that the curve is partly an artefact of how the data are analysed, and that it disappears or flattens when you follow the same people over time. The honest summary is that the dip is probably real, probably modest, and certainly not destiny.

What I take from it is narrower. I am thirty-two, and if the curve is real, I am on its downward slope, heading into the years in which the gap between what life was supposed to be and what it is tends to feel widest. That is not a reason for despair. It is a reason to start thinking about the question now, rather than waiting for the bottom.

So far this is a description of the problem, not an answer. The next question is why we are built this way, and the answer to that is inside the skull.

The chemistry of wanting

I spend my working life designing electronics that listen to very faint signals, so it seemed only fair to ask what the brain itself was doing while I sat through Sunday evenings feeling nothing in particular. The answer is not what the popular version says.

Dopamine is not pleasure

The popular version goes like this: dopamine is the brain’s pleasure chemical, achievements and likes and sugar release it, and we are all addicted to the hit. It is a tidy story, and it is mostly wrong.

The correction came largely from the neuroscientist Kent Berridge at the University of Michigan, who spent decades studying what happens when you take dopamine away. In a series of experiments from the late 1980s onwards, Berridge and his colleagues used a neurotoxin to destroy almost all the dopamine neurons in rats’ brains. Without dopamine, the rats would not go and get food; they would starve unless fed by hand. But when sugar was put in their mouths, they still showed the same facial reactions of pleasure that rats, monkeys and human babies all make when they taste something sweet: the rhythmic tongue protrusions, the lip-licking. They still liked it. They just did not want it.

From this Berridge, with Terry Robinson, drew a distinction that I think is one of the most useful ideas in modern psychology. The brain has two separate systems. Wanting is the drive to seek something out, the pull, the motivation; it is heavily dependent on dopamine and it is large, loud and easy to trigger. Liking is the actual pleasure when you get the thing; it depends on a much smaller set of “hedonic hotspots” using other chemicals, including the brain’s own opioids, and it is small, quiet and easily overwhelmed.

Most of the time, wanting and liking move together: you want what you like. But they can come apart. You can want something intensely that gives you little pleasure when you get it; that is, among other things, what addiction looks like. And you can like something you have stopped wanting, which is what happens to the hobbies we abandon and the friends we forget to call.

A good student, I think, is a person whose wanting system has been trained for twenty years on targets. The wanting is enormous: to get the rank, the place, the job. The liking, when the target is reached, is real but small, and it fades fast. And when there are no more targets, the wanting system has nothing to point at, and simply idles. That, to a first approximation, is what those Sunday evenings felt like. Not sadness. An engine running with nothing to pull.

Not sadness. An engine running with nothing to pull.

The error that makes us want

The second piece of the picture came from monkeys and fruit juice.

In the late 1980s and 1990s the neuroscientist Wolfram Schultz, then at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland, recorded the activity of individual dopamine neurons in monkeys as they learned simple tasks. When a monkey unexpectedly received a drop of juice, the dopamine neurons fired. Then Schultz began showing the monkey a light shortly before the juice arrived, every time. After a while, something remarkable happened. The neurons stopped firing when the juice arrived. They fired when the light came on instead. The reward itself, now expected, produced nothing. And if the light came on and the juice did not follow, the neurons dipped below their resting rate at exactly the moment the juice should have come: a small burst of disappointment, precisely timed.

In 1997, in a paper in Science with Peter Dayan and Read Montague, Schultz showed that the neurons were behaving almost exactly like a quantity from the mathematics of machine learning, called a reward prediction error: the difference between what you expected and what you got. Dopamine, on this account, does not signal reward. It signals surprise about reward. Better than expected: a burst. As expected: nothing. Worse than expected: a dip.

Put that together with a lifetime of exams and the arrival fallacy stops being a mystery. The first time you come top of the class, it is a surprise, and the burst is enormous. By the tenth time, it is expected, and the result produces almost nothing: the brain has already priced it in. And if you are the sort of person who is expected to do well, the only surprise left is doing badly. You end up in the strange position of a person for whom success feels like nothing and failure feels like a catastrophe. The CERN job, for me, had been anticipated for so long, in so many conversations, that by the time it arrived my brain had spent the reward in advance.

The practical lesson is not that we should expect less, although that would help. It is that happiness built entirely on outcomes is structurally unstable, because the machine that measures outcomes adjusts its expectations every time you meet them. There is no rank high enough to stay surprising.

The wandering mind

The third piece is about what the brain does when nobody is asking it to do anything.

In the early 2000s the neurologist Marcus Raichle and his colleagues noticed that a particular set of brain regions, towards the middle of the brain, front and back, became more active when people in brain scanners were told to rest and do nothing, and quieter when they were given a task. Raichle called it the default mode network. It is the brain’s idling state, and what it idles on, it turned out, is mostly ourselves: our memories, our plans, our worries, our imagined conversations, what other people think of us.

In 2010 two Harvard psychologists, Matthew Killingsworth, the same Killingsworth as before, and Daniel Gilbert, published a study built on an iPhone app that asked thousands of people, at random moments, what they were doing, what they were thinking about and how they felt. People’s minds were wandering away from what they were doing about 47 per cent of the time. And they were, on average, less happy when their minds were wandering than when they were not, even when they wandered to pleasant things. The title of the paper was the conclusion: “A wandering mind is an unhappy mind.”

That study helps explain something I noticed about work-life balance. The balance gave me time, and time, unstructured, gave the default mode network the run of the house. As a student I had almost never been without a task. As an employee with evenings, I was, for the first time, alone with a mind that had never been trained to be alone with itself. It filled the silence with the usual things: comparisons, plans, the question of whether I was doing enough. What looked like freedom felt, at first, like noise.

Where feelings come from

This is the part of the story that mattered most to me, because it is about the thing I did not know I was missing.

If you were educated the way I was, you probably think of emotions as interruptions: things that happen to you, get in the way of clear thinking, and are best managed until they go away. Neuroscience has spent thirty years showing that almost none of that is true.

The neurologist Antonio Damasio made the case most memorably. In his 1994 book Descartes’ Error, he described a patient he called Elliot, a successful businessman who had a tumour removed from the front of his brain, in a region just behind the eyes called the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. After the operation, Elliot’s intelligence, memory and reasoning tested as normal. But his life fell apart. He could not make decisions: he could spend half an hour deciding which pen to use or where to have lunch, weighing each option endlessly. He lost his job, his savings and his marriage. What he had lost, Damasio argued, was not reason but feeling. He could describe a tragedy in his own life with complete calm. And without feelings to mark some options as better than others, all options looked the same, and reason alone could not choose between them. Damasio called these bodily signals “somatic markers”. Emotions, on this view, are not the enemy of good decisions. They are what make decisions possible.

More recently, the psychologist and neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett has argued something even more radical: that emotions are not hard-wired reactions triggered by events, but constructions. The brain, she argues in How Emotions Are Made (2017), is constantly predicting what is happening inside the body, the heartbeat, the breath, the tension in the gut, and constantly interpreting those sensations in light of the situation. The same racing heart can become fear at the edge of a cliff, excitement before a performance, or love on a first date. The sense of the body’s internal state has a name, interoception, and much of it seems to be processed in a region deep in the brain called the insula.

Barrett’s view is contested; many researchers think she goes too far in denying that basic emotions are built in. But one of its implications is widely accepted and, for me, is the most useful idea in this section: the ability to notice and name what is going on inside you is a skill, and like any skill, it can be good or poor, and it can be trained.

The feelings without names

Some people are very poor at it, and there is a word for them.

In the early 1970s the psychiatrist Peter Sifneos, working at Harvard, noticed that many of his patients with physical symptoms that had no clear medical cause had something else in common: they found it extraordinarily hard to describe their own feelings. Asked how they felt, they would describe a headache, a tight stomach, or what had happened that day, but not an emotion. Sifneos coined the word alexithymia, from the Greek for “no words for feelings”.

It is not a disease, and it is not an all-or-nothing condition. It is a trait, on a spectrum, that researchers measure with questionnaires, and by most estimates something like one person in ten scores high on it. It is more common in men, and it seems to be more common in some professions and cultures than others. People who score high tend to be practical, focused on external events, and uncomfortable with introspection, which is to say that they make very good engineers and very good exam-takers. They also tend to have a harder time with depression and anxiety, partly because a feeling that cannot be named is very hard to deal with. It just sits there, as a vague heaviness, a tiredness, a Sunday-evening question.

I am not going to diagnose myself in a blog. But I recognise parts of myself in the description. I could tell you, in detail, what I had achieved in a week. I could not tell you, with any precision, what I had felt.

Naming it tames it

The good news is that the skill can be learned, and one of the simplest ways to start has some unexpectedly solid science behind it.

In 2007 the psychologist Matthew Lieberman and his colleagues at UCLA put people in a brain scanner and showed them photographs of faces showing strong emotions, angry or frightened faces. When people simply looked at the faces, the amygdala, a pair of almond-shaped structures deep in the brain involved in detecting threat, lit up as expected. But when people were asked to choose a word to label the emotion, “angry” or “afraid”, the amygdala’s response was reduced, and a region in the right side of the prefrontal cortex became more active instead. Just putting the feeling into words seemed to turn down the alarm. The researchers called it affect labelling.

The effect has been found in other studies since, including ones where people who labelled their feelings while approaching a spider became less anxious. It is not magic, and a word will not cure grief. But it gave me, as an engineer, something I could understand: a feedback loop. You cannot regulate a signal you cannot measure. Naming a feeling is measuring it.

You cannot regulate a signal you cannot measure. Naming a feeling is measuring it.

A note on serotonin

Since I am writing about the brain and unhappiness, I should deal with a story almost everyone has heard: that depression is caused by a “chemical imbalance”, a shortage of serotonin, which antidepressants correct.

In 2022 a team led by the psychiatrist Joanna Moncrieff published an “umbrella review” of the research on serotonin and depression and concluded that there was no consistent evidence that depression is caused by low serotonin. The review was widely reported, and widely misreported, as showing that antidepressants do not work. It did not say that, and other psychiatrists criticised the review sharply for how it was framed. What is fairly clear is that the simple chemical-imbalance story was always more of an advertising slogan than a scientific theory, that depression is not one thing with one cause, and that antidepressants help a substantial number of people even though we do not fully understand why.

What the brain is telling us

Pull these threads together, and the brain says something fairly specific about the question I was asking.

It says that the wanting system is built for pursuit, and the pleasure of arrival is small and short, so a life organised entirely around arrivals will feel thin. It says that the brain prices in expected rewards, so external validation, the thing I had been trained to run on, has steeply diminishing returns. It says that an idle mind drifts towards itself and, on average, becomes less happy for it, so freedom without some kind of engagement can feel worse than work. And it says that emotions are not interruptions to a good life but part of its machinery, and that the ability to notice and name them can be trained.

None of that tells you what your life is for. The brain does not do purpose. But it does tell you where not to look for it, and it tells you that the thing you are missing may be a skill rather than a secret. For that skill, the best place to look is not a laboratory but a therapist’s office.

What therapy knows

Therapy has a reputation, among people like me, as something for people who are broken. That is not what it is, and in any case the most useful ideas in it do not require a therapist. They are, more or less, a set of well-tested tools for the problem this essay is about: how to feel better, and how to live according to something, when nothing outside you is telling you what to do.

Thoughts are not facts

The most widely used form of psychotherapy in the world is cognitive behavioural therapy, CBT, which grew out of the work of the American psychiatrist Aaron Beck in the 1960s. Beck noticed that his depressed patients were not simply sad. They had a characteristic way of thinking, a set of automatic thoughts that ran in the background and that they rarely questioned: I always fail. Nothing I do matters. If I am not the best, I am worthless. He called them cognitive distortions, and the core of CBT is learning to notice these thoughts, examine them as hypotheses rather than facts, and test them against evidence.

Beck’s student David Burns later made a famous list of the common distortions. Reading it as a former good student is an uncomfortable experience, because several of them are, more or less, the curriculum. There is all-or-nothing thinking: a result is either excellent or a failure, with nothing in between. There is should statements: I should be further along, I should be happier, I should have figured this out by now. There is disqualifying the positive: that achievement does not count, anyone could have done it. And there is the one that best describes the arrival fallacy from the inside, which Burns calls emotional reasoning: I feel empty, therefore my life must be empty.

The point of CBT is not to think positively. It is to think accurately. “I got the job and I still feel flat, so something is wrong with me” is a thought, not a fact, and when you examine it, it turns out to rest on the assumption that getting the job should have made you permanently happy, an assumption that the previous section suggests no human brain can meet.

Action before motivation

A second, simpler finding has been one of the most practically useful things I have learned.

In the 1990s the psychologist Neil Jacobson and his colleagues ran a study that tried to take CBT apart to see which pieces did the work. They compared the full therapy with just one of its components, called behavioural activation: simply helping depressed people schedule and do things, especially things that gave them a sense of pleasure or accomplishment, whether or not they felt like it. To the surprise of many, behavioural activation on its own worked about as well as the full package. Later, larger trials found broadly the same.

The idea behind it runs against the way most of us think. We assume that motivation comes first: when I feel like it, I will do it. Behavioural activation says that, very often, it works the other way round. You do the thing, and the feeling follows. You go for the walk, call the friend, cook the meal, and the mood lifts, a little, afterwards. Waiting to feel motivated before you act is, for many people, a way of waiting forever.

For someone who had spent his whole life having his actions set by exams, this was oddly freeing. I did not need to find my purpose before I could start living. I could start by doing things, and see which of them left something behind.

Goals end; values do not

The idea from therapy that mattered most to me comes from a newer approach called acceptance and commitment therapy, ACT, pronounced like the word, developed by the psychologist Steven Hayes from the 1980s onwards.

ACT has two halves. The first, acceptance, is about how to relate to difficult thoughts and feelings: not by fighting them, which tends to make them stronger, but by noticing them, making room for them, and not letting them run your life. The second half, commitment, is about acting according to your values. And here ACT makes a distinction so simple that I am slightly embarrassed it took me thirty years to hear it.

A goal is something you can complete. Get the degree. Get the job. Run the marathon. Once you have done it, it is finished, crossed off, gone. A value is a direction. Being a good friend. Learning. Being useful to other people. Making things well. You never finish a value. You cannot tick off “be kind” and move on to the next thing. You can only keep moving in that direction, or not.

The therapists who use ACT like a particular image: a value is like heading west. You can travel west your whole life and never arrive at “west”. Goals are the towns you pass through on the way: useful markers, satisfying to reach, and not the point.

That was, I realised, exactly my problem. I had been given goals my whole life and never values. When the goals ran out, there was nothing left to steer by. The CBT in me could say that my thoughts about emptiness were distorted. The ACT in me could say something more useful: you are not empty, you have simply finished a list, and a list is not a direction.

You are not empty. You have simply finished a list, and a list is not a direction.

The man who measured meaning in a camp

It is impossible to write about purpose without Viktor Frankl, and it would be dishonest to write about him lightly.

Frankl was a Viennese psychiatrist who, before the war, had already been developing a school of therapy built around the idea that the deepest human drive is not pleasure, as Freud argued, or power, as Adler argued, but meaning. In 1942 he was deported, with his wife and parents, to the Theresienstadt ghetto; later he passed through Auschwitz and other camps. His father died in Theresienstadt; his mother and his wife were murdered. In 1946, within a year of his liberation, he wrote in a matter of days the book known in English as Man’s Search for Meaning.

In it he describes what he saw in the camps: that among prisoners subjected to the same unimaginable conditions, those who held on to some meaning, a person they hoped to see again, a book they wanted to finish, a task they felt life was still asking of them, were often better able to endure. He is careful not to claim that meaning saved lives by itself; luck, and the arbitrary decisions of guards, decided most things. But he quotes Nietzsche, “He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how,” and says that it became something like a principle of survival.

Two of Frankl’s ideas are directly relevant to this essay. The first is that meaning is not found by looking inward at yourself but by looking outward: at a task, at a person, at the attitude you take to suffering you cannot avoid. The second is a warning about happiness itself. In the preface to a later edition he wrote that success, like happiness, “cannot be pursued; it must ensue”, and that it comes “as the unintended side effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself”.

I will come back to that sentence at the end, because it describes, better than anything I could write, the one reliable source of happiness I have found.

The helper’s high

On that point, Frankl and the laboratory agree more than you might expect.

In 2008 the psychologists Elizabeth Dunn, Lara Aknin and Michael Norton published a short paper in Science with a simple experiment. They gave people on a university campus an envelope containing either five or twenty dollars, and told some of them to spend it on themselves by the end of the day, and others to spend it on someone else or give it to charity. That evening, the people who had spent the money on others were happier than those who had spent it on themselves. The amount did not matter. Twenty dollars on yourself did less for your mood than five dollars on someone else. Later studies found similar effects in many countries, rich and poor, and even in toddlers, who seem happier giving treats away than receiving them.

The longest-running study of adult life ever carried out points the same way. Since 1938, Harvard researchers have followed a group of men, first Harvard students and later a group of boys from poor Boston neighbourhoods, and in time their wives and children, through their whole lives. The study’s fourth director, the psychiatrist Robert Waldinger, summarised eight decades of findings in a sentence: the people who were happiest and healthiest in old age were not the richest or the most successful but the ones with the warmest relationships. “Good relationships keep us happier and healthier. Period.”

I did not learn this from the research. I found it out by accident, and only later discovered the research. I noticed that the only reliable happiness I felt that did not depend on someone praising me came when I did something for someone else and it made them happy. It did not need to be anything large. It was a proxy, I thought at the time, a workaround for the missing inner sense of happiness. It took me a long time to realise that it might not be a workaround at all. It might be the thing itself.

The diagram that isn’t Japanese

A brief digression, because it will save some readers time.

If you have spent any time on LinkedIn, you have probably seen the ikigai diagram: four overlapping circles labelled “what you love”, “what you are good at”, “what the world needs” and “what you can be paid for”, with the word ikigai, “reason for being”, at the centre. It is usually presented as ancient Japanese wisdom, the secret of Okinawan longevity.

Flow

One more finding belongs here, because it describes the kind of happiness that does not depend on results at all.

In the 1970s the Hungarian-American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi began studying artists, rock climbers, chess players and surgeons, people who spent long hours on hard activities that paid them little or nothing extra. He asked them what those hours felt like. Again and again they described the same state: complete absorption, a sense that time had changed speed, the self-consciousness falling away, action and awareness merging. Csikszentmihalyi called it flow.

Later he used pagers to interrupt ordinary people at random moments through the day, and found that flow happened most often when two conditions met: the challenge was high, and so was the person’s skill. Too easy, and people were bored; too hard, and they were anxious. In the narrow channel between, they were most fully alive. And, surprisingly, many people reported more flow at work than in their leisure time, which they often spent passively, watching television, in a state psychologists would describe as mildly bored.

Flow matters for this essay because it is happiness located in the doing rather than the result. A climber in flow is not thinking about the summit. A chess player in flow is not thinking about the rating. It is, in a sense, the laboratory version of Sisyphus’s moment on the hill: complete engagement in a task whose outcome is, for that hour, beside the point.

A small toolkit

It seems unfair to write this much about therapy and give the reader nothing to take away, so here, with the caution that I am an engineer and not a clinician, are the practices that the evidence and my own experience both suggest are worth trying. None of them requires a therapist, though a good therapist can make all of them easier.

Name it. Several times a day, stop and ask what you are feeling, and try to find a word more precise than “fine”, “tired” or “stressed”. Disappointed? Restless? Lonely? Proud? Emotion researchers call the ability to make fine distinctions between feelings emotional granularity, and people who have more of it tend to cope better with difficult ones. It feels artificial at first. So did learning to write.

Feel it in the body. Before you name it, notice where it is: a tight chest, a heavy stomach, clenched shoulders. That is interoception, the raw material of emotion, and for people who live mostly in their heads, it is often the easier way in.

Act first. When nothing seems worth doing, do something small anyway: a walk, a call, a meal cooked properly. Then notice how you feel afterwards. The feeling often follows the action rather than preceding it.

Write down your values, not your goals. Ask what you would want to be moving towards even if no one ever noticed or rewarded it. Then check, once a week, whether your days are moving in that direction.

Look outward. Do something for someone else that they did not ask for, and pay attention to how it feels. The research on this is some of the most robust in the whole field.

Leave some hours unfilled, and some filled completely. Idle time lets the default mode network wander, which is unpleasant but sometimes necessary. Deep, challenging work gives you flow. A life needs both, and most of us have too little of the second and too much of the wrong kind of the first.

A word of caution

One more interruption, because it applies to everything in this section.

Since about 2011, psychology has been going through what is called the replication crisis: when researchers tried, systematically, to repeat many famous experiments, a large share of them did not produce the same results. Some findings that had been in every popular book fell apart. The idea that standing in a “power pose” for two minutes changes your hormones and confidence did not survive, and one of the original researchers publicly said she no longer believed it. The idea that willpower is a limited resource that runs down like a battery, “ego depletion”, failed in a large multi-laboratory replication.

The findings I have described in this essay are among the better-supported ones, and I have tried to flag where they are disputed. But the general lesson stands. Happiness research is a young science with a lot of noise in it, and a great deal of what is sold as psychology on social media is somewhere between oversimplified and invented. Hold it loosely. Test it on yourself. Keep what works.

What therapy gave me, in the end, was not an answer to the question of purpose. It was a set of tools for living while the question stayed open: notice your thoughts, act before you feel like it, learn to name what you feel, steer by values rather than goals, and look outward. For the question itself, you need philosophy, and philosophy has been working on it for a very long time.

Three thousand years of the same question

The question “what is a good life?” is the oldest in philosophy, and every serious tradition has an answer. I am not going to pretend to survey them all. What follows is a walk through the ones that helped me, grouped roughly by what they recommend, with the caution that each deserves a book, and has had hundreds.

The Greeks: flourishing, pleasure and control

Aristotle gave the question its most influential form. In the Nicomachean Ethics, written in the fourth century BCE, he argues that everything we do aims at some good, and that the highest good, the one we want for its own sake and not for anything further, is eudaimonia. It is usually translated as “happiness”, which is misleading. A better translation is “flourishing”, or “living well”. For Aristotle, eudaimonia is not a feeling at all. It is an activity: the activity of a life lived according to virtue, using the capacities that make us human, over a whole lifetime. It is something you do, not something you have.

He adds a line I have always liked: “one swallow does not make a summer, nor does one day; and so too one day, or a short time, does not make a man blessed and happy.” A good result is a swallow. A good life is a season. That is, in two thousand-year-old words, the arrival fallacy corrected.

Epicurus, a generation later, is the most misunderstood philosopher in history; his name now means a person who loves expensive food. He actually taught almost the opposite. He was a hedonist, in that he thought pleasure was the good, but by pleasure he meant mainly the absence of pain in the body and of trouble in the mind, a state he called ataraxia, tranquillity. The way there was not luxury but simplicity: bread, water, a little cheese on feast days, freedom from fear of death and the gods, and above all friends. “Of all the things which wisdom provides to make us entirely happy,” he wrote, “much the greatest is the possession of friendship.” He and his followers lived together in a house outside Athens with a garden, and it was, as far as we can tell, a happy place.

The Stoics, from Zeno in Athens to the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, offered the toughest and most practical answer. Epictetus, a former slave who became one of their greatest teachers, begins his handbook with the sentence that is the whole of Stoicism in miniature: “Some things are within our power, while others are not.” Our opinions, our intentions, our actions are within our power. Our bodies, our reputations, other people’s judgements, the results of what we do are not. Unhappiness, the Stoics argued, comes from staking our peace of mind on the second list.

For a good student, that sentence is almost a diagnosis. Every result I had ever been happy about was on the list of things not within my power: marks, ranks, admissions, the opinions of examiners, the approval of others. I had spent my life staking my happiness on the one list I could not control. Marcus Aurelius, writing notes to himself in a military camp, put the alternative with an impatience I find very bracing: “Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one.”

India: craving, and the fruits of action

The tradition I grew up in has been working on this question for at least as long as the Greeks, and two of its answers speak more directly to my situation than anything in Athens.

The first is the Buddha‘s. His first sermon, at Sarnath, near Varanasi, set out the four noble truths: that life involves dukkha, usually translated as suffering but closer to unsatisfactoriness, the sense that nothing quite fits; that dukkha arises from taṇhā, craving, literally “thirst”; that it can end; and that there is a path to its end. What strikes me now, reading it after Kent Berridge, is how precisely the Buddha’s diagnosis anticipates the neuroscience. Taṇhā is not pleasure. It is the wanting, the restless pull towards the next thing, and the Buddha’s claim was that the wanting itself, not the absence of the thing wanted, is the problem. Two and a half thousand years before anyone recorded a dopamine neuron, he described a mind whose wanting system and liking system had come apart.

The second answer is the Bhagavad Gita‘s, and it is the one I grew up hearing, usually in a much shorter form. In the second chapter, the warrior Arjuna, standing between two armies on the field of Kurukshetra, refuses to fight, because he cannot see what the fighting is for. Krishna, his charioteer, answers him in a verse that every Indian child hears some version of:

कर्मण्येवाधिकारस्ते मा फलेषु कदाचन । मा कर्मफलहेतुर्भूर्मा ते सङ्गोऽस्त्वकर्मणि ॥

karmaṇy evādhikāras te mā phaleṣu kadācana | mā karmaphalahetur bhūr mā te saṅgo ‘stv akarmaṇi ||

Your right is to the action alone, never to its fruits. Do not let the fruits of action be your motive, and do not be attached to doing nothing. (2.47)

In Hindi, it is usually compressed into a saying that aunties and teachers repeat as a kind of household proverb: karm karo, phal ki chinta mat karo, do your work and do not worry about the result. As a student I heard it as a platitude, the kind of thing people said to you before an exam whose result they were, in fact, very worried about.

Reading it again at thirty-two, I think it is one of the most precise sentences ever written about the problem in this essay. Krishna does not tell Arjuna that action is pointless, or that results do not exist. He tells him that the results are not his to own, and that making them the motive of action is the mistake. The teaching is called niṣkāma karma, action without selfish desire for its fruits. It is the Stoic dichotomy of control, stated four or five centuries earlier and with a battlefield for a classroom. And it is, as we will see, remarkably close to what Camus concluded about a man and a rock.

It also says something the Stoics do not. The Gita does not tell Arjuna to withdraw from the world to find peace. It tells him to act, fully and well, in the world, for the sake of the action and for the sake of others; later chapters speak of acting for lokasaṅgraha, the welfare and holding-together of the world. It is a philosophy of doing, not of retreat. That mattered to me, because retreat was never an option I wanted. I did not want to stop working. I wanted to know what the working was for.

The moderns: the pendulum, the hammer and the leap

The European philosophers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were, on the whole, gloomier about the question, and some of them were right to be.

John Stuart Mill, having survived the crisis I described earlier, drew a lesson from it that has become one of the most quoted lines on the subject: “Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so.” Happiness, he concluded, could not be the direct aim of life. It came as a by-product of aiming at something else: “the happiness of others, on the improvement of mankind, even on some art or pursuit, followed not as a means, but as itself an ideal end.” Frankl, a century later, said the same thing.

Arthur Schopenhauer said something much darker, and I include him because he describes a feeling I recognised. For Schopenhauer, the whole of existence is driven by a blind, endless striving he called the will. We want, and wanting is a kind of suffering; we get what we want, and the satisfaction is brief and turns quickly into boredom; and then we want again. “Life swings like a pendulum backwards and forwards between pain and boredom.” It is the hedonic treadmill, described in 1818 by a man with a very bad temper and a poodle. I think he was wrong about the conclusion, that the best we can do is quiet the will through art, compassion and renunciation, but he was right about the pendulum. I had been swinging on it for years.

Friedrich Nietzsche, who admired Schopenhauer and then turned against him, offered the most demanding answer. He proposed a thought experiment he called the eternal recurrence: suppose a demon told you that you would have to live your life again, exactly as it is, every pain and joy and every small moment, over and over, forever. Would you curse him, or would you say you had never heard anything more divine? The test of a life, for Nietzsche, was whether you could want it again, all of it. His name for the ideal was amor fati, love of fate: “not merely to bear what is necessary, still less to conceal it, but to love it.”

Søren Kierkegaard, in Copenhagen in the 1840s, saw the same abyss and proposed a way across it: the leap of faith, a commitment to God that reason cannot justify and does not need to. I respect the honesty of it; Kierkegaard never pretended the leap was reasonable. It is not a leap I have been able to make.

And Jean-Paul Sartre, in Paris after the war, gave the most famous modern answer: existence precedes essence. Human beings are not made for a purpose, like a paper knife; we exist first, and then we make ourselves by what we choose and do. We are, in his phrase, “condemned to be free”, and meaning is not found but made. I find that bracing and slightly exhausting. It is a great deal of responsibility to lay on someone who has just finished his last exam.

We exist first, and then we make ourselves by what we choose and do.

What the tour adds up to

If you lay these answers side by side, something surprising happens. They disagree about almost everything, God, pleasure, the self, the world, and yet they converge on a handful of points.

Happiness pursued directly tends to escape: Aristotle’s swallow, Mill’s warning, Frankl’s “ensue”. The results of our actions are not ours to own, and staking our peace on them is a mistake: the Stoics, the Gita. Wanting is not the same as having, and the wanting can be the problem: the Buddha, Schopenhauer. Other people are central: Epicurus’s garden, the Gita’s welfare of the world. And meaning, if there is any, is found in how we act rather than in what we get: Aristotle’s activity, Krishna’s action, Sartre’s choosing.

What none of them quite does, for me, is look the central fact in the face and smile at it. The fact is that I could not find any meaning written into the universe. I did not believe in the leap, and I did not believe that the world had been arranged with me in mind. The Greeks mostly assumed a cosmos with an order; the Gita assumes a God; Sartre assumes we can conjure meaning out of choice alone. I wanted someone who started from the silence and did not look away. That turned out to be a goalkeeper from Algiers.

The goalkeeper from Algiers

A scholarship boy

Albert Camus was born in November 1913 in a small town in French Algeria. His father, a farm labourer, was killed at the Battle of the Marne when Albert was less than a year old. His mother, of Spanish descent, was partly deaf, could not read, and cleaned other people’s houses. He grew up in a poor neighbourhood of Algiers, Belcourt, in a cramped flat with his mother, his brother, an uncle and a stern grandmother.

He was, in other words, the least likely person in France to become one of its most famous writers, and the reason he did is a story every good student will recognise. His primary school teacher, Louis Germain, saw that the boy was exceptional, tutored him after school without pay, and persuaded the family to let him sit the examination for a scholarship to the lycée, which he won. More than thirty years later, a few weeks after he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, Camus wrote Germain a letter, which survives. Without you, he told him, without the affectionate hand you held out to the poor little child I was, none of this would have happened.

So Camus knew exactly what an exam could do for a child with nothing. He was a scholarship boy, the product of a system that rewarded results, and he never forgot it. That matters, because it means that when he later wrote about meaning and the lack of it, he was not a comfortable aristocrat playing with despair. He was someone who had climbed the ladder of results and then asked what it was leaning against.

He also played in goal. As a teenager he kept goal for the junior team of Racing Universitaire d’Alger, and he loved it. At seventeen he fell ill with tuberculosis, which ended his football, closed the path to an academic career, and stayed with him for the rest of his life. Years later he is reported to have said that what he knew most surely about morality and the obligations of human beings he owed to football.3The remark is quoted in several versions and is usually traced to a piece Camus wrote for his old club’s bulletin in the 1950s. The wording varies between sources; the sentiment does not. I like to think that a goalkeeper was the right person to write about a man who keeps losing the ball at the last moment and walks back to try again.

The book

He wrote The Myth of Sisyphus in 1940 and 1941, in his late twenties, while France was falling and he was moving between Algeria and a country under occupation. It was published in 1942, the same year as his novel The Stranger, and the two were meant to be read together: the novel shows a man living the absurd without thinking about it, and the essay thinks about it. The original edition left out a chapter on Kafka, because the German censors would not allow a book discussing a Jewish writer; it was restored after the war.

The book opens, as I mentioned at the start, with the question of whether life is worth living, which Camus calls the one truly serious problem in philosophy. It is worth being clear about why he starts there. He is not recommending anything. He is saying that before we ask the clever questions, about the nature of the mind or the categories of knowledge, we have to answer the basic one, and that most philosophy has quietly skipped it.

The absurd

His answer depends on a word he uses in a very particular way.

The absurd, for Camus, is not a property of the world. The world is not absurd; it is simply there, indifferent, making no claims. Nor is it a property of human beings, who want understanding, meaning, unity, a reason for things. The absurd is the relationship between the two: the confrontation between our demand for meaning and what he calls “the unreasonable silence of the world”. We ask, and nothing answers. The absurd is born in the gap.

I found that definition a relief, and I think it is worth explaining why. For years I had assumed that the emptiness I felt was either a fact about me, that I was defective, or a fact about the world, that life was meaningless and I had simply noticed. Camus said it was neither. It was the natural result of a creature built to look for reasons living in a universe that does not give them. The feeling was not a malfunction. It was an accurate reading.

The feeling was not a malfunction. It was an accurate reading.

Three ways out

Once you have seen the absurd, Camus says, there are three things you can do.

The first is to end your life, and Camus rejects it: it does not solve the absurd, it simply abolishes one of the two terms, you, and so dissolves the question instead of answering it. It is a surrender, not a response.

The second is what he calls philosophical suicide: to escape the absurd by a leap into hope, into some meaning beyond reason. His examples are the existentialist thinkers he admired and disagreed with, Kierkegaard above all, who looked straight at the absurd and then jumped over it into faith. Camus’s objection is that this is a kind of cheating. You have seen that the world gives no answer, and then you declare that the absence of an answer is itself the answer. It is, in his view, a way of killing the question while pretending to honour it.

The third way is the one he recommends, and it is the hardest: to live with the absurd, without escaping it, without hoping it away. He calls this revolt, and it is not revolt in the political sense, at least not yet. It is a refusal to be consoled: the decision to keep the question open and live fully anyway. From that decision, he argues, come three consequences. The first is revolt itself. The second is freedom: if there is no eternal plan, then you are not bound by one, and your life is yours. The third is passion: if this life is all there is, then the aim is not to live it well by some external measure but to live as much of it as possible, as intensely and consciously as you can.

That last idea is what Camus calls an ethic of quantity rather than quality. It sounds shallow, and it is easy to misread as “collect experiences”. What he means is closer to attention: to be fully present in as much of your life as you can, rather than spending it waiting for some future moment that will justify the rest.

The four absurd heroes

To show what living like this might look like, Camus sketches four figures. He is careful to say that they are illustrations, not models, and that he chose extreme cases on purpose. Each one lives the absurd in a different register.

Don Juan, the seducer, is the first, and Camus rescues him from the usual caricature. His Don Juan is not a man searching for the one perfect love and failing to find it, nor a cynic collecting conquests. He loves each woman fully and sincerely, with the same passion, knowing that it will end, and without pretending otherwise. He does not believe in eternal love, so he does not promise it. What he has is a series of complete presents. He is the hero of quantity, of saying yes to life again and again without asking any single experience to justify all the others.

The actor is the second. An actor lives many lives, each for a few hours on a stage, and then lets each one go. He gives himself completely to a character who will vanish when the curtain falls, and does it again the next night with someone else. Camus calls the actor’s realm that of the fleeting, and he admires the actor for accepting it: for making something whole out of what he knows will not last. He adds, with a certain pleasure, that the Church long regarded actors with suspicion, precisely because they multiplied lives in a way that seemed to mock the idea of one eternal soul.

The conqueror is the third, and the least obvious. Camus means not a general so much as the man of action who chooses history over contemplation: who throws himself into the struggles of his time, knowing perfectly well that nothing he builds will last, that empires fall and causes are forgotten, and acting fully anyway. The conqueror does not need his work to be eternal. He needs it to be his, and to be done with his whole strength, among other people, now.

The creator, the artist, is the fourth, and Camus calls him the most absurd of all. The artist makes work that explains nothing and changes nothing in the order of the universe, and makes it anyway, with everything he has. Camus’s phrase for it is that to create is to live doubly. The work does not rescue the world from meaninglessness. It is a way of living inside meaninglessness with open eyes and full hands.

What all four share is that they do not ask the universe to justify what they do. They are lucid, they are free, and they are passionate: Camus’s three consequences, embodied. None of them waits for an arrival.

The rock

And then, in the last few pages of the book, Camus turns to Sisyphus.

In the Greek myths, Sisyphus was the king of Corinth and the cleverest man alive, too clever for his own good. The stories about him vary, but the ones Camus chooses all have the same flavour. When Death came for him, Sisyphus tricked Death and put him in chains, so that for a while nobody on earth could die. Later, dying at last, he told his wife not to give his body the proper burial rites, and then, in the underworld, complained about her neglect and persuaded the gods to let him return to earth to punish her. Once back in the sunlight, by the sea, he refused to go down again, until the gods had him dragged back by force. His punishment, which Homer already describes in the Odyssey, was to roll a huge stone up a hill, and each time it neared the top, to watch it roll back down. For eternity.

The gods, Camus observes, had thought that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labour. And for most of human history, that is how the myth has been read: as the image of pointlessness itself.

Camus reads it the other way round. What interests him is not the pushing but the moment after the stone rolls back, when Sisyphus turns and walks down the hill to begin again. That walk, Camus says, is the hour of consciousness. Sisyphus knows exactly what his situation is. He has no hope that this time will be different. He is not deceived. And it is precisely his lucidity, which the gods intended as his torment, that makes him greater than his fate. His scorn for the gods, his hatred of death and his passion for life are what earned him the punishment, and they are still his, all the way down the hill.

Camus then makes the move that turned the myth for me. The workman of today, he points out, works every day of his life at the same tasks, and his fate is no less absurd than Sisyphus’s. What makes it tragic is only the rare moment when he becomes conscious of it. Sisyphus is not an exotic figure from myth. He is anyone who has ever done the same work again, and noticed.

And yet, Camus says, there is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn, and he does not mean contempt for the work. He means refusing to let the fate have the last word about who you are. The rock is Sisyphus’s. The struggle is his. And then the book ends, with two sentences that are some of the most quoted in modern philosophy. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

How I met him

I did not find Sisyphus in a library. I found him on a friend’s arm.

My friend Giorgos has a tattoo of Sisyphus on his forearm, the small figure bent against the huge round stone. I asked him about it, and he explained it: the myth, Camus’s reading of it, and why he had wanted to carry it with him. It was one of those conversations you do not realise is important until much later.

Some time after that, I came across the four absurd heroes by accident, in the sort of reading you do when you have spent years looking for an answer and have got into the habit of opening every door. And what struck me, reading them, was not that Camus was clever, although he is. It was that his answer described something I was already doing.

I had spent my whole life persevering. It was the one thing my training had made me genuinely good at: to keep going at a hard thing without knowing whether it would work, to push through the exam season, the thesis, the failed experiment, and to start again the next morning. I had always thought of perseverance as a means, the price you pay for the result. Camus was telling me that it could be the thing itself. That there was a way of pushing the rock that did not depend on the rock staying at the top. I settled on his answer, in the end, not because it was the most sophisticated philosophy I had read, but because it felt closest to home in my own actions. It described how I already lived, and gave me permission to stop apologising for it.

And the strange thing was how familiar it sounded. Karm karo, phal ki chinta mat karo. Do the work, and do not worry about the fruit. I had been hearing a version of Camus’s last page since I was a child, from people who had never heard of Camus. Krishna says the fruits are not yours to own. Camus says the struggle is enough. The Gita has a God behind it and Camus has none, and that is not a small difference. But on the question of how to hold your own work, the charioteer on the battlefield and the goalkeeper from Algiers are standing very close together.

The objections

It would be dishonest to present Camus’s answer as though nobody had ever argued with it. Plenty of people have, and some of the arguments are good.

The first objection is the most obvious: is this not just coping? Camus looks at a meaningless situation and decides to be happy about it. Is that wisdom, or a very elegant way of making the best of a bad job? I think the honest answer is that it is both, and that the distinction matters less than it seems. Every philosophy of life is, among other things, a way of coping. The question is whether it asks you to lie to yourself in the process. Camus’s does not. That is its whole point.

The second objection came from Jean-Paul Sartre, who praised The Stranger when it appeared and later became Camus’s friend and then his bitterest opponent. Their break, in 1952, was about politics rather than Sisyphus, but it grew from a real philosophical difference. Sartre thought that freedom meant commitment: choosing a side in history and acting on it, even at the cost of dirty hands. Camus, especially after the war, insisted that some means could never be justified by any end, and that revolt had limits. Sartre thought that was the position of a moralist standing on the sidelines. Camus thought Sartre was excusing murder in the name of the future. Readers still take sides.

The third objection is the most interesting to me, and it came from the American philosopher Thomas Nagel, in a short essay called “The Absurd” in 1971. Nagel agreed that life is absurd, but thought Camus had described the absurd wrongly and responded to it too dramatically. The absurd, for Nagel, does not come from the world’s silence. It comes from inside us: from our peculiar ability to take our lives completely seriously and, at the same time, to step back and see them from a point of view from which nothing seems to matter. We cannot stop doing either. And so, Nagel argued, the right response is not heroic defiance, shaking your fist at the gods like Sisyphus, but irony. If nothing matters from the point of view of eternity, then that does not matter either, and we can live our absurd lives with a certain lightness rather than with clenched jaws.

I think Nagel is right, and that it does not hurt Camus as much as it seems to. Read carefully, Camus’s Sisyphus is not clenching his jaw on the way down the hill. He is happy. Irony and happiness are close relatives.

From me to us

The most important development in Camus’s thinking came after The Myth of Sisyphus, and it is the part that finally connected his philosophy to the one reliable source of happiness I had found.

Sisyphus is alone on his hill. In 1947 Camus published The Plague, a novel about an Algerian city sealed off by an epidemic, and its hero, the doctor Rieux, is a very different kind of absurd man. He has no hope that his work will defeat the plague for good; he knows it will come back. He fights it anyway, day after day, with a small group of volunteers, not because he believes in heroism but, as he says at one point, because the only way to fight a plague is common decency, which in his case means doing his job. And in 1951, in The Rebel, Camus rewrote Descartes’s famous “I think, therefore I am” as “I rebel, therefore we exist.” Revolt, which began as one person’s refusal to be consoled, turns out to be the thing that joins people together. When I refuse to accept injustice done to someone else, I discover that I am not alone.

That, for me, is where the philosophy and the life finally met. For years I had thought that my happiness at doing things for other people was a proxy, a workaround for an inner happiness I did not have. Camus’s later work, and Frankl, and the Gita’s welfare of the world, and the experiments with envelopes of money, all suggested something else: that it was not a workaround. It was the place where meaning is actually made, between people, in shared work, in the small decency of doing the task in front of you for someone else.

It was not a workaround. It was the place where meaning is actually made.

Camus died on 4 January 1960, at forty-six, in a car crash on a road in Burgundy, in a car driven by his publisher’s nephew. He had planned to take the train, and according to the story everyone tells, an unused train ticket was found in his pocket. In the mud near the wreck was a briefcase containing the unfinished manuscript of a novel about his childhood in Algiers, dedicated to his mother, who could not read it. It would be too neat to call his death absurd. He would have called it an accident, and gone back to work.

Back to the rock

So, the question I started with: now that I can support myself, why keep going?

I do not have a final answer. I do not think Camus did either; he would have distrusted anyone who claimed one. But I have ended up somewhere, and in the spirit of the rest of this site, I want to say plainly where, and what I have kept from each part of this long walk.

Which hero am I?

I have spent more time than is reasonable wondering which of Camus’s four absurd men I am. The honest answer is that I am a little of three of them and none of the fourth.

There is some Don Juan in me, though not in the sense the name suggests. What I recognise is his refusal to ask any single thing to be the one that justifies all the rest. I have loved people and places fully, knowing I would move on from some of them, and I have mostly stopped pretending that the next one will be the one that finally settles everything. But he is not my main character.

There is more of the actor. I have lived several lives already: the boy in Lucknow, the student in the Netherlands, the engineer in Geneva. Each came with its own language, its own manners, its own version of me, and each time I moved, I had to let one of them go and learn another. I used to think of that as losing something. Camus’s actor suggests another way of seeing it: that a life can be made of several complete performances, none of them the “real” one, all of them lived in full.

But if I am honest, I am mostly the conqueror, in Camus’s peculiar sense of the word. I am not an artist. I am, by temperament and training, someone who chooses action over contemplation: who would rather build a thing than write about it, which is an odd admission at the end of a very long essay. The conqueror knows that what he builds will not last. Every chip I have designed will be obsolete within a decade; the experiments it serves will be superseded; the particle accelerators and laboratories themselves will one day be switched off. I used to find that thought quietly depressing. The conqueror finds it clarifying. The work does not need to be eternal to be worth doing with your whole strength. It needs to be done well, now, among people you respect.

And the creator? Not me. I do not make things that exist for their own sake. I make things that are useful to other people, which may be the whole point.

How to think about the work

This is the part that matters most to me day to day, because most of my life, like most people’s, is work.

As a student, work was learning, and learning had a direction built in: every year you knew more than the year before, and the exams told you so. As an employee, much of the work is not learning. It is doing: solving the problem in front of you, delivering what was promised, often repeating things you already know how to do. There is less learning in it and more labour, and part of me, the good student, still finds that faintly disappointing, as if I have stopped growing.

The way I have come to think about it borrows from everyone in this essay.

From the brain science, I have kept the idea that the wanting system is built for pursuit, not arrival, so I have stopped expecting results to make me happy and started paying attention to the doing. There are hours, when a design problem is hard and interesting and the rest of the world goes quiet, when I can be completely absorbed. Psychologists call that state flow. Those hours are the swallow and the spring at once. They do not need to lead anywhere.

From therapy, I have kept the distinction between goals and values. My goals at work will end: projects finish, chips tape out, papers are published. My values will not. I want to keep learning, even when the job does not require it, so I do it for its own sake now, not for a grade. I want to do honest work, work that does what it says and does not cut corners that nobody will notice. And I want to be useful to other people: to the colleagues who depend on what I build, to the students and juniors who ask for help, to the scientists whose experiments run on it. None of those can be ticked off. All of them are directions.

From the Gita and the Stoics, I have kept the idea that the fruit is not mine. Whether a design succeeds, whether a project is funded, whether anyone notices, is on the list of things not within my power. The care I put into the work is on the other list. I try, not always successfully, to stake my peace of mind on the second.

And from Camus I have kept the rock. Most work, including mine, is Sisyphean in the plainest sense: you finish the thing, and there is another thing, and another, until you retire. The question is not how to escape that. It is how to walk back down the hill. The good student in me walks down the hill waiting for the next result. Sisyphus walks down it knowing exactly where he is, looking at the view, and thinking about how he will push the stone this time. I would like to be the second kind of walker. Some days I am.

The question is not how to escape the rock. It is how to walk back down the hill.

The rock I chose

There is one more rock in my life, and it is the one I chose myself. I run.

It started, like most things for a person like me, as a goal: a distance, a time, a race. It has become something closer to a practice, and it has turned out to be the most practical way I have found to keep pushing the other rock, the one called everyday life. One day I would like to finish an Ironman, the triathlon of a 3.8-kilometre swim, a 180-kilometre bike ride and a full 42.2-kilometre marathon, one after the other, and to run an ultramarathon, anything longer than a marathon and often much longer. I am not there yet. That is rather the point.

I have thought about why running works for me, and the answer runs through almost every section of this essay.

It gives the good student in me what he needs, but on better terms. I still get the small bright moments of achievement: a longer distance than last month, a faster kilometre, a race finished. The wanting system gets its targets. But these are targets I set myself, for reasons of my own, and nobody is marking me. In the language of self-determination theory, running is competence without the loss of autonomy. It is the first set of exams in my life that I wrote myself.

It is also the purest form of flow I know. On a good run, somewhere after the first half hour, the chatter of the default mode network goes quiet, and there is only the breathing, the road and the next few metres. I am not thinking about the finish. I am running.

And it is honest about the rock. A run ends where it began; you go out and you come back, and the next day the body wants you to do it again. No run is ever finished for good. Fitness, like Sisyphus’s stone, rolls back down if you stop pushing it. The runners I admire most seem to understand that without having read Camus. The novelist Haruki Murakami, who has run a marathon a year for decades and written a small book about it, quotes a line he heard from another runner that could be a caption for the whole of this essay: pain is inevitable, suffering is optional.

There is a less romantic reason too, and it is the one I think about when I lace up on a cold morning. The science on exercise is among the most solid in this whole essay. Large reviews of clinical trials have found that regular exercise, including simply walking and jogging, reduces symptoms of depression about as well as some of the standard treatments. And fitness itself, the capacity of the heart and lungs measured on a treadmill, is one of the strongest predictors of how long people live: in large studies following tens of thousands of patients, the fittest groups had far lower death rates than the least fit, a difference as large as or larger than that associated with smoking or diabetes. I am running, in part, towards a particular old age: one in which I can still walk up a hill, carry my own shopping, and sit somewhere quiet with a clear head. A healthy and peaceful old age is not a result you can collect at the end. It is built, one ordinary run at a time, decades in advance.

So the Ironman and the ultra are goals, and I will enjoy them if I get there. But the value underneath them is simpler: to keep a body that can keep pushing, and a mind that is quieter for it. It is the one rock I would push even if nobody ever saw me do it.

It is the first set of exams in my life that I wrote myself.

What happiness turned out to be

I said at the start that I had been programmed to find happiness in accomplishment and external validation, and that I had no inner sense of it. That is still partly true. You do not undo twenty years of gold seals in a few years of reading.

But I have learned three things that have changed how that feels.

The first is that the missing inner sense of happiness is not a hole in me. It is, at least partly, a skill I was never taught: the skill of noticing and naming what I feel. Like any skill, it improves with practice, and I am practising.

The second is that the happiness I get from doing things for other people is not a second-best substitute for the real thing. Mill found it, Frankl found it, the Harvard study found it, the experiments with envelopes of money found it, and Camus found it in The Plague. Happiness, as Frankl said, cannot be pursued. It ensues, and one of the most reliable places it ensues is in the face of someone you have helped.

The third is that purpose, if there is such a thing, does not have to be discovered, as if it were written somewhere and I had failed to find it. The universe is silent on the subject, and I have made my peace with that. Purpose is something you do, every day, in the direction you choose, with the people around you. It is a verb.

One must imagine me happy

So here is where I have ended up, at thirty-two, with a decent salary and no more exams.

I keep going because the going is the point. Not the result at the top of the hill, which rolls back down whether I like it or not, but the pushing, the attention, the craft, the long run on a cold morning, the walk back down in the evening light, and the people I meet on the way. The universe does not tell me what any of it is for. It does not need to. I can decide what to care about, and care about it fully, and that is enough to fill a life.

On a good day, I believe that completely. On a bad day, I believe it the way you believe in a friend who is not in the room: I trust that it is still true, even if I cannot feel it. And on both kinds of day, I think of a small figure on Giorgos’s forearm, bent against a stone that is much too big for him, and of a scholarship boy from Algiers who looked at that figure and decided, against all the evidence, that he was happy.

I have not finished the essay on my own happiness. I suspect I never will. But I have stopped waiting for the result.

One must imagine me happy. Most days, I can.

Sources

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