I am Sisyphus

There are many arguments both for and against the Ph.D. as an educational institution. General argument, however, gain little traction as Ph.D. experiences are as diverse as the scholars who pursue them. Some follow very well-defined paths, others wander. My experience has been the latter, as I have tried to marry the disciplines of statistical physics and collective animal behavior. I use the term marry here, because I am not trying to do physics that just happens to be about animal groups, or just study animal groups employing a few tools from physics. The goal is broader, to think about problems and solutions that truly have significant interest to both fields and represent an advancement in both communities. This means considering systems that are complex enough to be behaviorally intriguing and methods of experiment and analysis that are quantitatively rigorous.

The best example of such a marriage I can provide is a wonderful paper on the behavior of a fruit fly by Dr. Gordon Berman et al. It is the product of four years of hard work. It is amazingly complex and only considers a single animal, not social interactions between individuals.

As a result of the exploratory nature of the work we are undertaking, the majority of my six years as a Ph.D. candidate has been spent vigorously pursuing ideas that ended at dead ends. It has often been hard and utterly disheartening. Often I have felt like Sisyphus, the mythological Greek king who was condemned to spend eternity pushing a boulder to the top of a hill, only to nearly reach the top and have the stone roll back down to the bottom. He is trapped forever in an entirely hopeless loop, utterly devoid of meaning.

During a particularly difficult couple of months, I was on the phone with a college roommate. J.J. patiently listened and responded with a single quote—the last line from an essay by Albert Camus:

One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

This is not how he is typically portrayed in art, and not how we would typically think of him and his fate. Camus, however, focuses on Sisyphus as he plods down the hill after the bolder has escaped his grasp and rolled all the way back down to the bottom. Camus imagines the peace and joy that Sisyphus finds upon accepting the absurdity of his fate. The key here is that it is his personal fate, and therein lies its purpose.

When discussing the daunting process of writing a dissertation with a friend Mira (who was also writing her thesis), she echoed the same sentiment. This period of intense hard work is something special and purposeful. We are writing, not so much for anyone else, but for ourselves. I am Sisyphus, and in that realization I am happy.

So I repeat again Camus’ words:

I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one’s burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

(Sketch by Matt Buck)

References

GJ Berman, DM Choi, W Bialek, JW Shaevitz. Mapping the structure of drosophilid behavior. arXiv:1310.4249, 2013

A Camus. The Myth of Sisyphus.