2012-08-30
Explanation
This comic features a student challenging a professor about the myth of Sisyphus. The student asks: "Wait, Professor... if Sisyphus had to roll the boulder up the hill over and over forever, why didn'''t he just program robots to roll it for him, and then spend all his time wallowing in hedonism?" The professor responds, "It'''s a metaphor for the human struggle." The student replies, "I don'''t see how that changes my point." The caption below reads: "It'''s getting harder and harder to be existentialist."
The comic plays on the tension between existentialist philosophy and modern technology. In Albert Camus'''s famous essay "The Myth of Sisyphus," the endless, futile labor of rolling a boulder up a hill only to watch it roll back down is used as a metaphor for the absurdity of human existence. Camus argues we must imagine Sisyphus happy, finding meaning in the struggle itself. The student'''s suggestion to automate the labor and pursue pleasure instead represents a modern, technologically-minded rejection of existentialist values -- why embrace the struggle when you can engineer your way out of it?
The professor'''s defense that it is a metaphor does not satisfy the student, because the student'''s point applies equally to the metaphorical level: if the "human struggle" can be automated away, then perhaps existentialism'''s emphasis on finding meaning through struggle becomes obsolete. The votey panel reinforces this theme with a graph showing "Desire for Meaning" declining as "Awesomeness of Life" increases, suggesting that the more comfortable and enjoyable life becomes through technological progress, the less urgently people seek existential meaning.