Olav, a friend of mine, worked for the post office in order to pay his bills while he was studying. His job was to turn mailbags inside-out in order to see if any letters were stuck in the bags. One day, while turning yet another mailbag inside-out, the utter futility of human existence struck him, and he started sobbing like a child, although, being a good Protestant, he kept on doing his job as the tears ran down his cheeks. The problem was that he saw no end to what he was doing; there would always be another mailbag coming in. There seemed to be no progress, just the eternal recurrence of the same.

Olav's situation at work was in some respects similar to that of Sisyphus. According to the Greek myth, Sisyphus was condemned by the gods to roll a rock up to the top of a mountain, only to have the rock roll back down to the bottom when he reached the top. And then he would start rolling the rock back up, before it rolled down again. In The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), Albert Camus argues that the gods were wise in understanding that an eternity of futile labour is the most dreadful of punishments: “The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight.