I often think of the closing lines of David Fincher’s 1995 film “Se7en”, which feature Morgan Freeman’s Detective Somerset saying, “Ernest Hemingway once wrote ‘The world is a fine place and worth fighting for.’ I agree with the second part.”
It is perhaps appropriate that Detective Somerset is named after William Somerset Maugham, author of “Of Human Bondage” – a novel which explores the struggle for meaning.
Humans are, in many ways, defined by their relationship to struggle.
Whether it be class struggle, economic struggle, social struggle, political struggle or physical struggle, we are constantly fighting against something.
Even birth is a struggle – a long, painful process that further adds another being to face the slings and arrows of life.
Struggle is not considered a conventionally good thing. It can cause us a lot of hardship. It can even kill us.
And I sometimes find it overwhelming to think of human history and the varieties of struggles faced by countless people.
I am somewhat frightened by the number of people who lived entire lives defined by struggle.
Russian serfs who toiled in fields for their entire lives or African slaves who spent their entire lives in bondage.
Or Judean criminals who were crucified for stealing bread, or Vietnamese farmers killed in an aerial bombardment.
Even the Roman soldiers who were unceremoniously cut down in a cold, Germanic forest.
It makes it all feel pointless.
Our struggles, which seem like the entire world to us, are not even a speck in the window of history.
I am, perhaps naturally, a very cynical person. I always seem to seek out the worst humanity has to offer and delve headfirst into learning about it.
And I often come back to that quote. I also disagree with the first part, and every day I have to choose to believe the second.
Because if our lives are, unavoidably, filled with struggle – then why not make that struggle mean something?
Apathy is spiritual death. And yet, we live in a world that rewards it.
Even among young people, the idea of being “nonchalant” is seen as cool and aspirational.
Though it’s funny that we have to aspire to achieve that state rather than it being inherent to our being. Perhaps it is because we, as humans, are designed to care.
Why would we want to struggle for the sake of struggling?
If we are inevitably going to face hardship and pain and disappointment, wouldn’t we want it to mean something?
French philosopher Albert Camus wrote “The Myth of Sisyphus” in 1942.
In this work, he compares Sisyphus’ task of rolling a boulder up a hill each day to the human condition.
It’s grueling, tiresome, and ultimately, pointless. The boulder is just going to roll back down each time.
But Camus does not frame this negatively. No, quite the opposite.
Camus says there is a liberation in Sisyphus’s task. A beauty.
Sisyphus exists as a free, defiant force against the struggle of life. He rolls the boulder each day and allows it to fall because it’s the struggle that is rewarding.
“One must imagine Sisyphus happy,” Camus writes.
No one can assign an objective meaning to the struggles we face every day. No one can explain why struggle is inherent to being a human.
So, it is up to the individual to create meaning for struggle and perhaps find beauty in it.
As Camus writes, “the struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart.”
