Between Sisyphus and Ganbatte, the rock, the chair, and the courage to choose…

✍️ By Arian Galdini

A perfectly ordinary morning with a phone in your hand is enough for the whole metaphysics of adult life to compress into two images on the screen.

At the top, a notification, Sisyphus sitting under his own boulder, naked, exhausted, with the piercing question, “Should you just give up?”

Just below, a calm sentence from a virtual friend, the Japanese have a word, ganbatte, which translates as never give up, keep going forward.

Two creeds, two liturgies, two roads.

At first glance they look like ads.

In truth, they behave like new religions of human exhaustion.

On one side appears ganbatte.

A short word, carrying the scent of Tokyo train stations, open-plan offices, classrooms packed with children studying late into the night.

It sounds like a gentle command, keep going, try harder, push beyond the limits of yourself.

In the culture of self-help this word wears a new suit.

It becomes a shield of productivity, an instant shot of energy for the person who wakes up tired and still shoulders the day.

Motivational books, social media posts, digital postcards use ganbatte like a sacrament, the sentence is written, the heart warms, the task goes on.

This discourse of resilience stands on a single belief, suffering makes sense only if it is turned into results.

Fatigue becomes an investment; teeth are clenched, one’s place in the world is secured by miles ground down.

Life takes the shape of a marathon, character is measured in distance, the only sin is “dropping out of the race”.

This ethic exalts figures of sacrifice, discipline, long endurance.

At the same time, it shifts our gaze away from a fundamental question, in what direction is this marathon running?

Ganbatte speaks loudly about strength, and leaves the horizon unspoken.

On the other side stands Sisyphus.

In the myth he strains to roll his boulder up the mountain, the boulder delights in falling back into the abyss, an endless motion without reward.

In the contemporary illustration the mythical hero no longer climbs the slope, no longer leans into the rock.

He sits on a white chair, hand on his forehead, the boulder suspended above his head, ready to crush him with every new effort.

The caption beneath the image tilts the story onto a new track: “Sisyphus couldn’t stop pushing his boulder, you can.”

The message comes out sharp as a blade, where the ancient hero remains eternally chained to his punishment, the twenty-first-century person still holds the ability to say “enough”.

The question “Should you just give up?” appears as provocation, as an invitation to a different kind of silence.

This liturgy of stopping defends an important truth, there are jobs that dissolve the soul, engagements that swallow identity, causes that become prisons justified with beautiful words.

When life keeps rolling the same rock without horizon, the deepest moral act appears as refusal to push it any further.

Ending a punishment you have chosen yourself becomes a high form of spiritual hygiene.

Seen from this angle, giving up takes on another colour.

It appears as an act of wisdom, as a return of inner freedom.

The burden that enslaves is released, the responsibility that heals remains.

Both messages arrive on the screen on the same day.

Each lives on its own, yet in our consciousness the two voices weave a hidden dialogue.

The Eastern call to keep going and the Hellenic invitation to stop do not come from temples or libraries, they are brought to us by a newer priest, the algorithm.

Social media read our traces like clerics of an invisible caste.

They watch which texts hold us, which videos slow our scrolling finger, which key words raise our pulse.

In this way our secret profile is built, a tired human being, searching for meaning, suspended by questions about work, calling, belief.

It is precisely to this person that the algorithm sends two sermons, the word ganbatte and Sisyphus’s chair.

One raises the flag of persistence, the other blesses the abandonment of the boulder.

The platforms count above all the seconds of our attention, without the slightest awareness, they become a mirror of our inner dilemma.

They do not know us.

They only measure us.

No one forces us to believe any of this, except our own exhaustion.

The adult who sees these images in quick succession suddenly finds themselves at the centre of a double liturgy.

One voice cries, “stay, persevere”, the other whispers, “shake off your useless punishment”.

Between them stands personal conscience, summoned not to become a rock, not to become a chair, not to turn into an extension of the algorithm.

At the root of this dilemma lies a question older than Sisyphus and more concrete than any motivational book, which weights are born of calling, and which are born of idols.

Sisyphus’s boulder embodies every project, profession, or mission that eats daily energy. The white chair marks the moment when body, mind, and soul ask for a halt.

Ganbatte whispers, get up, push the rock again.

The seated Sisyphus invites, look at the rock, weigh it, ask yourself whether it still serves your life.

When the rock springs from an inner calling, fatigue becomes a liturgy of freedom.

Long sacrifice brings growth, even wounds begin to shine with light from within.

A person feels worn down, yet senses that every step brings them closer to a horizon chosen in conscience.

When the rock descends from outside, as social pressure, as career idol, as an unexamined obligation, that rock takes on the nature of punishment.

A heaviness settles on the chest, breath shortens, the whole day circles around a duty that does nothing to feed the soul.

In that moment ganbatte turns temptation into cult, the daily maintenance of a monument with no inner justification.

The chair then takes on the role of an altar that stands inside.

Sitting down, pausing, sincere contemplation become an act of judgement:

What is this rock doing to me?

What is it doing to my family, my body, my mind, my relationship with what I hold sacred?

The person who dares to sit facing their own boulder is drawn into a holy process, where the main question sounds like this: Am I still the right person for this rock, or is this rock calling for another set of shoulders?

Most of us know at least one rock we never truly chose. I do too.

Our age sets perseverance on a pedestal and drags surrender into the dock.

In the language of business and personal development, stepping away from a project, a job, or a role is often imagined as a failure of character.

Older spiritual and philosophical traditions tell another story.

Surrender that comes after deep reflection appears as an act of cleansing.

Western saints describe the restless heart that finds rest only when it returns to its source.

Wise teachers of the East speak of “the hard path” where a person leaves behind whatever is not truly theirs, so that the self can be recentered.

Thus two faces of surrender appear, a tired surrender, born of terror and fear, that dims the inner light, a wise surrender, born of knowing one’s limits and respecting another’s calling, that opens new paths.

Imagine a distinguished surgeon, after decades of white nights, realising that his hand no longer has the steadiness it once did and his eye tires.

The decision to leave the operating theatre to a younger generation, not out of bitterness but out of reverence for life, embodies precisely this kind of surrender.

A role is lost, a new honesty is gained.

The Sisyphus in that illustration, sitting under his rock, stands exactly on this threshold.

He sees the disproportion between his wounded body and the mass of stone, between the eternity of the task and the fragility of the breath.

Sitting down becomes a prophetic gesture, one day this blind kind of motion will end, because the person of the new century refuses to live as a mere instrument of punishment.

On the other side, true perseverance keeps its own grandeur.

Often the person who endures a long hardship does so with a motive greater than personal pride, out of a conviction that their life is bound up with the lives of others.

The parent who wakes at a sick child’s bed, the teacher who holds a class together even when conditions disappoint, the doctor who walks into the operating room after a sleepless night, all of them embody the holiness of ganbatte.

Perseverance becomes an act of love when its horizon stretches beyond the self.

Then every heavy day becomes a foundation stone, without taking on the face of a punitive rock.

In this dimension, the Japanese word gains different content, not bare productivity, but fidelity to the good that has been entrusted to a person.

Modern culture often considers it more noble to collapse while running after the wrong rock than to stop and admit you have chosen the wrong mountain.

That is where the deception of exhaustion begins.

Here too, the key lies in direction. Perseverance that draws a person closer to their truth and closer to others brings blessing.

Perseverance that pushes them away from themselves and turns them into a tool of a productivity creed becomes a trap.

Between the two liturgies, that of going on and that of stopping, a third, quiet, rarely printed word is born, the art of choosing.

This art demands that a person not fuse with any one of their roles.

Their deepest identity stands beyond rock, chair, and slogan.

The human being asks, discerns, chooses, becoming capable of saying “yes” where calling ignites, and “enough” where a foreign punishment is trying to consume them.

True choosing sets a person before three questions:

What rock do I carry in my chest that truly belongs to my own heart?

What rock belongs to an era, a system, a counterfeit social expectation?

Where do God, conscience, love, and my personal story call me to continue, even when my body bends?

When these questions receive honest answers, the word ganbatte and the image of Sisyphus each sit in their proper place.

A person wakes one morning and says, for this rock, yes, I will go on.

Another morning begins with a quiet sentence, I have served this boulder long enough, now let someone else carry it, or let it return to being a rock with no master.

The art of choosing remains the word posters forget, once it is missing, every poster turns into a shining deception.

Japan of discipline and Greece of myths speak together on the small screen of a phone.

One short word calls for unbroken marching. One naked figure sits before his own rock and asks whether the time for silence has come.

Between them stands the person of our century, bombarded by ads, tired of being tired, never quite at peace in the search for meaning.

This person holds in their hands a power that ancient Sisyphus and the heroes of Eastern discipline never experienced, the power to choose the direction of each rock.

To choose the mountains, to build chairs of rest without abandoning the summits that truly matter.

Their life becomes a series of decisions where calling is distinguished from punishment, mission from idolatry, service from self-destruction.

When that person looks at the two images on the screen, they keep them as mirrors, never as commands.

In one mirror they see the strength of their own steadfastness.

In the other they see the justice of resting.

Then, with a calm smile, they set the phone aside and make the decision in the silence of the heart.

There, far from the noise of ads, the hardest sentence of adult life is born, exactly here I will go on, exactly there I will stop.

And the rock, the chair, ganbatte, Sisyphus, the algorithm, all of them climb down from their thrones.

In their place rises the simple dignity of a human being who dares to choose.

Arian Galdini