The Old Man, The Sea, and The Myth of Sisyphus

What a Cuban fisherman and a doomed Greek king taught me about burnout.

Spoiler alert 🚨

I bought The Old Man and The Sea, Hemingway’s final novella, without knowing a thing about it. It joined the Everest of books I really must get around to reading sometime, a stack that has quietly reached record-breaking heights over the past year. It has been the busiest, most stressful period of my professional life. I barely found time to sleep, let alone read. (One can always find time to buy books, of course).

Not only did this prompt an unread book pile up, it also threw me headlong into a state of burnout — one I couldn’t escape while the deadlines kept coming. Though I missed each one with admirable consistency, I somehow managed, always relying on that ‘last little bit left in the tank’ to get me over the line. That is until January of this year, when the tank - or rather, my body - finally collapsed under the weight of constant pressure.

Burnout had razed me to the ground. I was catatonic.

“Time to read,” I thought.

And with that, I impulsively booked a seven-day stay at whatever sunny resort Google proposed to me, and hopped on the first outgoing flight from Quebec City. Suitcases stuffed with bikinis and books, off I went.

I spent the first few days slipping in and out of consciousness on a sun lounger, reading whenever I found myself awake and lucid. It was here, lying on a beach in Cuba, that I opened The Old Man and The Sea.

“Wait a second. The old man is a Cuban man! The sea is this sea!” A shock of delight ran through me.

I was reading Hemingway’s Cuba in Cuba. The right book, in the right place, at the right time.

“What luck!”

It tells a story of hope and of human resilience in the face of adversity. Or at least, it tries to. But I arrived at its pages still semi-catatonic and, critically, having read Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus just hours prior (an arguably dangerous choice for a woman in crisis).

The actual myth of Sisyphus, before Camus got his existenstially angsty hands on it, is an ancient Greek tale about a mortal King who made the unfortunate mistake of ruffling Godly feathers. As punishment, he was condemned to roll a boulder uphill for all eternity. *Internal screaming.* Over time, poor Sisyphus has been co-opted as shorthand for laborious, unending tasks — quite the fall from grace.

In contrast, Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus is, at it’s core, a reflection on whether life is worth living. It famously ends with the line: “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” Why? Because there is no alternative. Life is absurd, hope a delusion, and the boulder isn’t going anywhere. *Internal screaming intensifies.*

Camus prescribes rebellion. His argument is that, once you accept life’s meaninglessness, you have two choices: collapse under the weight of existential dread, or keep pushing the rock anyway. Not because you expect progress, or resolution, or even a break, but because the pushing itself must be enough. And if you can manage to find some grim satisfaction in it, congratulations: you win. Here, Sisyphus emerges as the absurd hero. Way to turn it around, Sisyphus!

“The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart,” Camus assures us. It’s not exactly comforting.

“Enjoy hell, suckers! No, but really, try to enjoy it.” It felt suspiciously like the kind of platitudey motivational nonsense Camus had spent the entire essay dismantling.

And so there I was: sun-drunk, existentially tender post-Camus, watching the old man hook his marlin and fight it for three days. And when he finally dragged its ravaged carcass back to shore, stripped clean by sharks, what did he have to show for it?

Nothing.

It felt… Sisyphean.

Absurd.

I flipped to the back of the book, looking for some kind of buffer. An epilogue, a postscript, a footnote clarifying that, actually, the real prize was the friends he made along the way. Instead, I found the Also by the Author page, laid out with all the warmth of a coroner’s report.

And then, the last line:

"Hemingway committed suicide in 1961."

I stopped breathing.

"Fuuuuuuuuuck."

1961. Which meant The Old Man and The Sea - this story about resilience, about not giving up - was written just nine years earlier. It had won Hemingway the Nobel Prize he’d always wanted.

He would have been around 60 when he chose to die, about the same age as my mother.

Suicide rates, statistically speaking, tend to be highest in older age. Which feels counterintuitive. You’re almost there, right? You’ve fought your battles, raised your kids, made it through. Why quit so close to the finish line?

But the older you get, the more loss compounds, and the more your sense of possibility shrinks. Paths that were once open seal off behind you. The list of things that could happen, the lives you might have lived, begin to narrow down to the one life you actually did. And if that life, when you take stock of it, feels like a series of fights won only to be undone, if it feels Sisyphean, then what’s left?

One thing Camus and I agree on (among many, many others) is that hope, religion, and the search for inherent meaning render us fragile. They offer comfort, sure, but only so long as they hold up. All it takes is one good kick - grief, failure, entropy in some brutal form - and suddenly, those defenses collapse. You're left standing in the rubble, exposed, staring directly into the absurd. Cold. Brutal. Indifferent. This is when people choose to die.

The longer you're alive, the greater the odds of encountering that moment. The absurd will find you. And when it does, it will ask: Was it all worth it? Knowing what you know now, will you still push the boulder?

Hemingway, it seems, answered no.

And yet, whether he meant to or not, he gave us one of the clearest illustrations of absurdism in fiction.

Santiago, for all his suffering, treats the marlin with care. He talks to it. He respects it. He calls it his brother. When he finally kills it, he does so with reverence, not victory. And when the sharks come, carving away the prize he fought so hard to bring home, he doesn’t curse the universe or shake his fist at the sky. He simply fights, even as he knows the fight is futile.

It holds the missing piece of absurdism, the part The Myth of Sisyphus doesn’t quite say. Life is cruel, the universe indifferent. But we are not. We see beauty. We feel it. And more importantly, we care for it. Santiago doesn’t just endure; he regards the marlin with reverence, treats it with tenderness. He suffers, but he does not become cruel. He does not take on the indifference of the universe.

That, I think, is the better answer to the absurd. Not Camus’ cold assurance that "the struggle is enough to fill a man's heart." Not "Enjoy the grind, bitches!" but something softer:

"Enjoy the scenery."

We, who were never meant to be here, who were spat into a world that offers no inherent meaning, went ahead and made some anyway. Not just through rebellion, not simply by pushing the rock, but by stopping, when we can, and admiring the scenery. By allowing ourselves to be delighted by such things as stumbling onto a beach in Cuba, cracking open a book we knew nothing about, and realising, midway through, that it is set on the very Havana horizon stretching out before us.

Absurdism is like nihilism warmed up, steadying our resolve without hardening the heart. Nihilism tends to make people insufferable, the kind of bitter cynics you regret inviting to your cocktail party. In contrast, absurdism allows us to be delighted, to create meaning for ourselves, to behave as optimists despite knowing better.

And it allows us, like Santiago, to treat life with more tenderness than it has ever shown us.

When I explain absurdism to the uninitiated, I use a Bill Hicks-inspired line: Life is just a ride. There’s freedom in that. It’s what allows us to look suffering in the face and, rather than collapse, laugh. Not because it isn’t tragic, but because it is, and what else can you do? Life is just a ride. And unlike poor Sisyphus, we are not condemned to it for all eternity. The wheels will eventually stop turning. The track ends.

So maybe let’s just… be patient? And, in the meantime, be delighted, wherever possible.