“And I saw Sisyphus in agonizing torment, drafting a reply to Kayleigh’s ten urgent UX questions. He hit ‘send,’ and immediately received an autoresponder: ‘I no longer work here! For questions, contact Caleb, Chief Joy Officer.’”
— Homer, Odyssey
– – –
“Sisyphus thinks he can outwit death. But the company hive-mind pings him relentlessly, even on weekends, and so he stares at his phone on a Saturday and misses his daughter score her first goal at a soccer game.”
— Pindar, Olympian Ode
– – –
“Athena quietly adds Sisyphus to a sinister Google Doc called ‘Q3 brainstorm,’ which emails him whenever anyone comments on this document he does not desire and from which he cannot escape. The notifications may be silenced only in settings reserved for The Gods—and thus, not for Sisyphus.”
— Seneca the Younger, Hercules Furens
– – –
“There, Sisyphus toils—straining to zero the inbox, only for Nathan to smite him with that cruelest of follow-ups: ‘Just checking if you saw this?’”
— Virgil, Aeneid
– – –
“Sisyphus wrestles eternally with newsletters,
and with blistered fingers, he deletes them.
But the eCommerce companies are relentless,
and just as he clears a hundred promos,
an email from Houzz.com arrives—
advertising ‘backyard sheds with functional beauty!’
‘What the fuck is Houzz?’ Sisyphus wonders.
Did he buy a coffee table from them six years ago?
Yes, but he does not remember.”
— Ovid, Metamorphose
– – –
“Sisyphus, son of Aeolus, betrayed Zeus’s Gmail password to the river god Asopus. For this, he was condemned to eternal vigilance: a work inbox, a Slack, and three personal email accounts—one for family stuff, one for his many Substack subscriptions, and one for his fan-fiction podcast, The Cerberus Celebration. Each must be checked hourly, lest Sisyphus feel the creeping itch, the divine terror that somewhere, someone powerful was waiting for a reply—and growing quietly furious.”
— Apollodorus, Bibliotheca Digita
– – –
“Sisyphus, slyest of mortals, is punished for his ‘Out Of Office’ reply—condemned to circle back with idiots who forget why they emailed him to begin with.”
— Plato, Gorgias
– – –
“With great cunning, Persephone seduced Sisyphus into trying Zeus’s Thunderbolt, a hot new app that promised to mass-unsubscribe him from spam newsletters. But it was a trick, and Zeus’s Thunderbolt instead flooded him with scores of emails hawking meme coins.”
— Hyginus, Fabulae
– – –
“The Gods have made his grind eternal. Sisyphus uses a week of paid vacation to enjoy the sun-drenched beaches of Belize—only to pull out his laptop and get tangled up in a work thread about how to market to keto moms. When this fatigues him, he catches up on emails about his Nordy Club rewards while the majestic dolphins of Punta Gorda frolic beyond his ken.”
— Lucian of Samosata, Dialogues of the Dead
– – –
And from the depths of Erebus, Sisyphus heard the Stygian Choir sing—
“Hey, it’s Zip Cleaners! We’ve updated our privacy policy. 🤩”
“Action Required: Enable two-factor authentication for your Jiffy Lube App!”
“Forgetting something? Andrew Huberman’s Sleep Stack is waiting in your cart 👀”
— Orphic Fragment
– – –
“I leave Sisyphus at the inbox. His unread emails always number ten thousand-plus. Each reply he sends is a fleeting pleasure—it rings a tiny bell in his brain, whispering: I accomplished something. I am important. When he writes a meticulous, nine-paragraph reply to his CEO—which will never be read—one must imagine Sisyphus productive.”
— Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
