What if Sisyphus actually enjoyed rolling the rock up the hill?
For his crimes, Sisyphus of Greek mythology was condemned to rolling a boulder up a hill repeatedly, for eternity. I see it as a parable to our everyday lives. Don’t we, too, do the same thing, day after day, without end? (Well, until the ultimate end.) Wake up, go to work, cook, an hour of Netflix, sleep, then do it all over again.
The only respite is our weekends. But ever since we’ve reached adulthood, our weekends ceased to be the hedonistic smorgasbord of childhood. There’s responsibilities, errands, and general upkeep that make the work-week possible. (Especially those with children.) Can an adult really afford to play videos games all weekend? I wouldn’t call the person who does, an adult.
Maybe you have vacation once or twice a year. That’s fantastic. But there’s that pit in your stomach when your vacations come to a close, that you soon have to return to reality. Vacations are like Sisyphus taking a brief break from bouldering. The verdict remains: back to pushing the rock you must go.
Our lives are a repeating cycle, over and over. This isn’t meant to be a sobering conclusion. Sisyphus’ sentence is only a punishment if we think he rebels against it. But what if he likes it? What if pushing that boulder forever uphill is as enjoyable for him as a video gamer playing videos games continuously? The outcome is not grim at all if Sisyphus relishes his fate.
And that goes for us, too. No matter how much novelty you are financially able to throw at your life, the cycle cannot be escaped. Even when you strip it down to the bare minimum, we still have to repeatedly eat, drink, defecate, and sleep.
Sameness, the endless cycle: that’s what we are condemned to. So I choose to like it. Despair is not productive. Not for you, nor for society at large.
What’s important to find within that repeating cycle is improvement. Sisyphus must be one superbly muscular guy after pushing that boulder that many times! He can be proud of that, as we can of ourselves when we seek to constantly improve. A positive outlook and application at work is a high correlate to advancement. Just because we have to constantly work for money, doesn’t mean work itself cannot change. I’d argue the possibility for change is what makes us get out of bed in the morning.
It doesn’t even have to be climbing the organizational ladder, or making more money. (I would say those are positive side-effects.) The fact that you get better and gain more knowledge at your profession is enough. Problems that used to be difficult are now easy. Responsibilities that used to be burdensome are now a quick snap judgement. The self-esteem you receive from that growth makes you want to keep going. After a certain period of time, Sisyphus surely knows the best most efficient way to get the rock up that hill.
The folks with children: seeing the change in your kids makes the endlessly monotonous task of child-rearing worth doing. I have great joy in witnessing the change in my friends’ kids. Every time I see them, there’s something new. Perhaps a sudden growth spurt, or something new they’ve learned that they are eager to share with me. This can be the novelty you seek in your seemingly boring and mundane life.
If you see life as Sisyphean, then improvement - in yourself, or the people we care for - is the antidote.
Let’s look at exercising. Other than the two times I was out of the country, I’ve not missed a scheduled workout in 2024. It’s not because I am some paragon of mental toughness. Like the rest of you, I greatly prefer lying on a couch than hefting some iron onto my back. And to do so three times a week, week after week? Unlike Sisyphus, I at least have an option to stop!
It's the change I see that keeps me returning to the squat rack. Every single pound I add to the bar is a triumph. Seeing certain muscles grow in size is a win, however vain that indeed is. The understanding that I am working towards being the healthiest version I can be. That I’m not just doing it for the 37-year-old me. The goal is for the mobile and athletic 80-year-old me to be thankful to the present me, who had the wherewithal to keep pushing that boulder.
Still very much a beginner, in 2024 I progressed from dumbbells to the barbell. I am extremely lucky that my friend slash landlord has a squat rack and cable-tower in the garage - that I am free to use. A home gym really is the ultimate for us weight-lifting enthusiasts. Cutting down the commute to and from the gym is already worth everything (though I do live within walking distance from a commercial gym). Then there’s the lack of need to contend with others for gym equipment. I don’t have to suffer the indignation of an interrupted routine, because another guy is already occupying a piece of equipment.
If I ever buy a house of my own, a home gym setup is a definite must have. Add in a steam sauna, too.
I have two revelations to share, after a year and a half of consistent weightlifting. The first is patience. Sure, progressively increasing the amount of weight you move is important, but it’s easy to go overboard in going up too quickly. Ego lifting is how you get injured (I unfortunately understand this first-hand). Those of us not assisted with alternative medicine (read: anabolic steroids) don’t have the luxury of speed. This hobby is supposed to take many, many years. Then into a lifetime.
What I’ve come to do is let a new weight level really marinate before moving up the scale. Let’s say I newly load 165 pounds for a back squat. I will stay at 165 for at least a few weeks (if not more) to let my body acclimatize to the sensation. While heavy weights will always be heavy, lifting 165 off the rack becomes easier the more I do it. I only add more weight to the bar (or dumbbell for other exercises) when I reach some admittedly subjective comfort level with the current weight.
Again, it’s supposed to take a long time. It’s harmful to compare to others, either in a public gym, or on social media. Seemingly overnight successes take a lot of overnights to achieve. Run your own race; the more you compare, the less great you feel about yourself. And the more you are inclined to take shortcuts. You want Warren Buffet’s money, but not the decades that it took for him to attain it. That’s not how it works.
Shortcuts are destructive. Those desiring a shortcut to wealth are wont to gamble their money into the stock market. Almost all of them will lose. Those desiring a shortcut to their ideal body are wont to take steroids, trading away literal lifespan, in order to massively accelerate towards an outcome. It is short-term, childish thinking.
The second revelation is diet: you must feed the body adequate fuel for it to grow. Seems obvious, right? Babies can’t develop properly if they are under malnutrition. The problem, as in pertains to male fitness, is that guys are so adamant about preserving visible abs. But visible abs generally require a level of leanness that’s not conducive to muscular growth. Professional bodybuilders on a stage, with muscles popping out and vascularity all over, are actually in horrible shape health-wise. That miniscule level of body-fat percentage is hugely detrimental to energy and testosterone levels.
The proverbial cake cannot be had and eaten as well. I had to make a choice: visible abs or increasing lean muscle mass. Midway through 2024, I decided on the latter and made an effort to eat more calories. Instead of spinning the wheels, there’s finally forward motion.
Have you ever been happily concentrating on doing something, only to be unhappily interrupted by the animal need of eating? If you are like me and look at food more on the utilitarian side rather than the gastronome end, the constantly repeating need to feed myself can sometimes seem like a chore. Why must I interrupt something I am enjoying, to do something that I don’t?
Like Sisyphus with the rock, I don’t have an option (well, aside from the singularly morbid one). I must find joy in making the food I eat, more so than ever this year.
I don’t have the luxury of buying off the labor of food-making with money. More power to those who can, but I definitely cannot afford to pay another person on DoorDash to bring me a burrito from a Mexican restaurant two miles away. Heck, I can’t even afford the burrito itself, given how food prices remain monstrously high in 2024.
The high inflation period of the COVID years may have subsided, but that doesn’t mean prices have gone back down. For prices to recede, there has to be an economic deflation. The negatives of which would be wholly not worth the tradeoff of lower prices at McDonald’s. In a deflationary period, you might not even have a job to pay for outside food.
In this period of high food prices, I, armed with employment, cannot fathom paying for restaurant food. That’s why this year I’ve cooked at home more so than ever before. If there’s a dish I want to eat, I would buy the ingredients and make it myself. There’s great joy in tasting a newly learned dish and finding it to be just as good (if not better) as the restaurant version.
Home cooking doesn’t have to be monotonous. So long as I continuously improve on technique, and increasing the arsenal of dishes to make. Any worthy adult should be able to whip up a proper meal that wouldn’t be embarrassing to share.
And I wholeheartedly believe in the value of sharing a meal with friends. That’s why the only time I eat out in this economy is when I am doing so with others. The inflated prices are worth paying for the socialization and friendship.
It is otherwise difficult to look at the economic happenings of 2024 and not give pause to how I spend. All we see on the news are companies right-sizing and laying off workers. The university I work at has declared a financial emergency. It’s little wonder that the Democratic party lost the elections. You cannot throw enough positive statistics at people to convince them the economy is fine. Facts don’t vote, feelings do.
I carried a precarious feeling about my financial situation ever since the beginning of the year. Again, it doesn’t have to be based on facts. In fact, my financials were (and are) fairly decent mathematically. I have savings, I have investments, I have a retirement, and I don’t have credit card debt (humble brag). Even with that, the uneasy feeling about the economy led me to resolve cutting back on spending as much as possible in 2024. That’s why I cooked at home more than ever, and learned to use and enjoy that material things I already have.
Because everything has gone up in price. I am fortunate to make more salary now than I did in 2019, but that increase doesn’t seem to have materialized in aggregate. The same car I bought in 2019, I cannot comfortably do so if I were to buy it again now in 2024. Because it’s not only the car that has gone up tremendously in price, but so has the stuff on the periphery.
Gas, insurance, maintenance, and license fee - it’s a far larger cumulative boulder today, one that my salary cannot afford to push uphill.
That’s why I’ve been agonizing with a dilemma all year: should I buy another car (that’s vastly cheaper than the car I was talking about just now). I finished paying off my current BMW M2 this year. Being an enthused car enthusiast, I started thinking about what to do with that extra money per month. Most of us (car enthusiasts) endeavor to have many differing experiences. If you have a real-wheel drive coupe, then perhaps an all-wheel drive sports sedan will add to the variety.
Obviously: buying a second car is in direct clash with my self-imposed austerity goals in 2024. All the cutting back here and there would not be able to overcome the enormity that a stroke of the pen on a sales contract can bring. There lies the dilemma: what do I want? Because I absolutely cannot have both. (There’s that cake and eating it again!)
The automobile is not merely a tool to us car enthusiasts. It’s a hobby and a passion. The prevailing personal finance standard of how much one should spend on private transportation does not apply to car guys and gals. We are destined to spend an inordinate amount of money on buying, maintaining, and upgrading cars. Much like hobbyist photographers spending many multiple thousands on camera gear.
So it would be incorrect for me to apply that prevailing standard into the question of buying a second car. I’m supposed to spend a larger chunk of my income on cars. It’s what I am passionate about, and it brings me a ton of happiness. I am stuck between two rational sides: it’s rational to conserve money in this economy (I already have a paid-off car), and it’s rational to spend money on a hobby I love.
At one point it got so agonizing that I questioned whether I still loved cars. Imagine that, asking that about a thing I’ve been dedicatedly enthusiastic about since childhood.
I still don’t know if I will buy second car in 2025. What I do know is that I want to drive more miles next year. In the whole of 2024, I only filled up the M2’s tiny fuel tank twelve times (the car has appropriately horrendous fuel mileage.) That’s due to two factors. The want to limit spending already aforementioned is one.
The second is me being on Accutane medication for almost half the year. For those unfamiliar: Accutane is the endgame drug for acne. I’ve finally resolved to kill this chronic malady, one that’s been with me in varying forms of severity since puberty.
The COVID pandemic’s masking culture really exacerbated my (what was) latent acne. Coupled with increased dairy consumption (I supplement whey protein to hit my daily protein goals) to support my weightlifting (milk is an acne inflammatory for many people), the state of my face was at its worse since puberty. It’s deleteriously depressing to wake up every day to new pimples. The regiment of skin-care products continuously losing an unwinnable fight.
I am delighted to report that here at the end of 2024, I am acne free (though the scars remain to tell a story). The effectiveness of Accutane is well known. So are its side-effects, bordering on notorious. I am lucky that my side-effects were mild, though that still meant a persistent state of dryness (lip balm is my new best friend), and huge sensitivity to the sun.
That’s why I’ve not driven much this year: I had to avoid going outside. Even on a cloudy day, the need to drink an enormous amount of water - and the subsequent bathroom visits - makes it logistically challenging. What’s seven months of inconvenience in trade for the rest of an acne-free life? A very tiny price to pay.
I eagerly await the day - early 2025 - I can do outside activities during the daytime again, without worrying about whether I’ve brought lip balm with me.
2024 was the first time since the start of the pandemic that I traveled outside of the country. And what better place to fly to than the epicenter of COVID 19: China. It’s been four long years since we were last able to see relatives from my father’s side of the family. To coordinate the special occasions, we went back to China during Lunar New Year festivities.
My advice for the common tourist that otherwise do not have family in China: don’t visit during Lunar New Year. Almost everybody has the week off, therefore almost everything is closed. Gastronomes seeking the truly local food flavors are going to have a bad time running into closed for vacation signs. We found entire malls closed for the holiday. If you wish to experience China, travel there during any other time.
It's of course wonderful to see family again, after seemingly such a long time. The euphoria I got stepping off the plane in Hong Kong - after an arduous 15-hour plane ride - was like finding a long-lost friend. I didn’t realize I missed traveling to foreign countries so much. Before the pandemic, I had made this trip every year. This is one boulder I definitely do not mind repeatedly pushing uphill.
Though I am sad to say that if it weren’t for family, China would not be on my travel itinerary for a long time. It’s become hugely inconvenient for a foreigner to do stuff there. China is famous for its vast adoption of digital payments using WeChat and Alipay, except foreigners do not have access. Those platforms require a local bank account, which foreigners cannot get. It makes paying for things unnecessarily inconvenient, to downright impossible.
Sure, cash is still excepted everywhere (by law, supposedly). However, depending on the vendor, you the foreign tourist may be the first and only cash transaction of that day. There’s a solid chance the vendor won’t have any bills on hand to make change. Want to pay for a ¥250 taxi ride from the airport, but you only have ¥100 bills from the ATM? That taxi ride is very likely to cost ¥300.
(Your American credit cards are effectively useless outside of western-brand department stores. You can’t even use one to buy a bullet train ticket.)
What is travel if not spending money on the local economy? The current system in China makes it so incredibly difficult for a foreigner that I lost interest in exploring further. And that’s a shame, because there are many bustling metropolises there that demand a visit. (I would love to go see the uniqueness of Chongqing.)
I rather visit the bustling metropolises in other Asian countries. Where either cash, foreign credit cards, or both, are readily accepted. (See you again in 2025, Seoul!)
It’s indeed lovely to travel again. 2024 was a grand return to before the pandemic: a connection, a continuation of where I left off at the end of 2020. Obviously, a lot has irrevocably changed during those pandemic years, but I’ve always felt like being in a sort of limbo, whilst the world sorts out dealing with COVID 19. (Or is it the other way around?) The ability to go back to China once more signaled a true return to regularity, at least for me.
Then Accutane medication brought upon a kind of mini pandemic, putting a pause to that grand return. All extracurriculars that involve going outside were stopped. I’ve done massively less driving and photography this year, both of which are critically important hobbies. Painful as it may be to lose (even) more time, it’s a necessary step. A part of constant improvement is fixing issues that should have been fixed a long time ago.
Self-improvement is the remedy for the ceaselessly repeating in our lives. I feel this more acutely than ever now that I am in the meaty chunk of adulthood. Since we are stuck doing the same things over and over - like Sisyphus, we might as well reap positive benefits out of it. Over a long enough period of time, you might find yourself doing something different, over and over. Because you’ve progressed, from being the store grunt, to now the store manager.
That’s what I am focusing on in 2025, and well beyond. I wish you all the best possible health in the coming year.
Top 10 Songs of 2024
1. ITZY - Mr. Vampire
2. LE SSERAFIM - Smart
3. Red Velvet - Sweet Dreams
4. LE SSERAFIM - Easy
5. NewJeans - Bubble Gum
6. GroovyRoom - Yes or No (Feat. HUH YUNJIN of LE SSERAFIM, Crush)
7. NewJeans - How Sweet
8. DAY6 - You were beautiful 예뻤어
9. Zico - SPOT! (FT. Jennie)
10. Irene - Like a Flower
