In Greek myth, Sisyphus, the king of Ephyra (now Corinth) defied Zeus by revealing his abduction of Aegina to the river god Asopus. For this reason, Zeus sentenced him to eternal punishment, rolling a boulder uphill only for it to roll back down every time it neared the top. Some of you might know this story, some might be reading it for the first time. However, this myth has often been used as an allegory for the human condition (or entropy, as I prefer to call it). Our actions, all of our actions, are always undone. That is just the way of this world. Our first instinct might be to react with sadness to this realisation. But isn't that kind of silly?

Let's go back to Sisyphus. If he was not rolling the boulder uphill, what would he be doing? Nothing. He wouldn't be doing anything. This is the beauty of entropy. The very existence of work keeps us occupied, because the alternative of work is sin (missing the point).

Consider the neuroscience here: the default mode network of the brain—that constellation of regions active during rest—is associated with rumination, envy, social comparison, and self-referential thinking. When we engage in focused work, we suppress this network. The prefrontal cortex takes charge, dopamine flows through reward pathways, and we enter what Csikszentmihalyi calls “flow.” This isn't philosophy; it's measurable brain chemistry. Work literally reconfigures our neural states away from the patterns that generate what tradition calls “sin.”

In the Christian canon, the prophet Jesus was crucified, and he was made to carry his own cross to Golgotha. Not just futile, painful, and humiliating, but his own hard work would result in his death. Yet here's what's often missed: in the Gospel accounts, Jesus is most fully himself—most aligned with his purpose—during this labour. “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do,” he says while actively engaged in the work of dying. The physical exertion prevents despair, prevents hatred, prevents the collapse into self-pity. The cross becomes, paradoxically, both burden and scaffolding for virtue.

The Buddha understood this perhaps most scientifically of all. Before his enlightenment, Siddhartha Gautama tried extreme asceticism—the negation of all work, all effort, all engagement with the material world. It nearly killed him. His breakthrough came when he accepted rice from a village girl and realised that the middle way required constant, mindful effort. Buddhism's Noble Eightfold Path isn't about achieving stasis; it's about Right Action, Right Livelihood, Right Effort—all forms of work. The meditation practice itself is work: the endless returning of attention to the breath, the constant noting and releasing of thoughts. When asked why one should meditate, the Buddha essentially said: because the alternative is dukkha—suffering born from idle craving, aversion, and delusion. Idle hands are the devil's playthings.

Think about the thermodynamics: a system at equilibrium is dead. Life exists only in systems far from equilibrium, maintained by constant energy expenditure against entropy's gradient. This isn't metaphor—it's physics. Ilya Prigogine won the Nobel Prize for showing that complexity emerges specifically from work done against entropy. Every living cell is a Sisyphus, pumping ions against concentration gradients, synthesising proteins that immediately begin to degrade, maintaining order in a universe that tends toward disorder.

The seven deadly sins, viewed through this lens, are essentially states of insufficient work against entropy:

• Sloth: obvious—the absence of work itself
• Envy: emerges from idle comparison rather than active creation
• Pride: the delusion that one's work is complete, that maintenance isn't required
• Greed: the hoarding impulse that emerges when we stop creating and start merely accumulating
• Wrath: the explosive release of energy that wasn't channelled into constructive work
• Gluttony: consumption without production
• Lust: desire divorced from the work of genuine relationship

Each represents a failure to engage with the fundamental work of existence. The monastery's ora et labora (pray and work), the Zen temple's samu (work practice), the Protestant work ethic—all are technologies for preventing the consciousness from collapsing into these entropic states.

The empirical evidence is overwhelming: unemployment correlates with depression, purposeful activity alleviates anxiety, and even patients with terminal illness report higher well-being when engaged in meaningful tasks. The retirement mortality spike is real and measurable. We literally die when we stop pushing the boulder.

But here's the profound insight that unites Sisyphus, Jesus, and the Buddha: they all chose their boulder. Sisyphus could despair, Jesus could have fled, the Buddha could have remained a prince. Their work became sacred not through its outcome but through its acceptance. The boulder always rolls back, the crucifixion always ends in death, the breath must always be watched anew. And yet.

Camus said we must imagine Sisyphus happy. The Gospels say Jesus went “for the joy set before him.” The Buddha smiled when he touched the earth. They understood what neuroscience now confirms: happiness isn't the absence of work but the full engagement with it. The alternative to pushing the boulder isn't rest—it's dissolution.

Entropy isn't our enemy; it's our purpose. Without it, there would be no work to do, no virtue to practice, no consciousness to maintain. We are anti-entropic eddies in the thermodynamic flow, and our work—pointless, endless, sacred—is what we are.

The stone rolls back. Good. We have something to do tomorrow. Chop wood, carry water.

Sept. 20, 2025, 12:02 p.m.

Written bY CYril