My first thought, when considering this morning’s column, was to discuss ‘Success Bombing’. According to at least one journalist, “Success bombing is a symptom of our increasingly narcissistic culture, and it’s having a negative impact on friendships…”
I had never heard of “Success Bombing” until I overheard a couple of ladies discussing the idea at the coffee shop. By discreetly eavesdropping on their conversation, I gathered that “Success Bombing” refers to a person who brags endlessly about their successes — they just got a big pay raise, or recently returned from a fabulous vacation, or they’re now dating a woman who actually knows how to cook — you know, successes.
And that’s all they talk about. Endlessly.
But then I changed my mind. There are already too many unpleasant articles available, about “bombings” in various places around the world.
What if I wrote about something more ‘positive”? And less narcissistic?
Like, for example, about Sisyphus.
In case that name is not instantly familiar, Sisyphus was the clever king of Corinth, wily enough to outsmart Zeus, Hades, and maybe a couple of other deities.
Too clever by half. When the gods finally caught up with him, he was sentenced to a punishment in the Underworld — compelled to push a large boulder up a steep slope, only to have it slip away from him and roll back down to the bottom, whenever he approached the summit. So back down he went, to start the process all over again.
What we might call “Failure Bombing”.
No one has been able to explain to me why Sisyphus agreed to this arrangement. I mean, why didn’t he just tell the people in charge, “Hey, I’m not doing this anymore. You can get some other clever king to roll your boulders for you.”
What are they going to do? Fire him? Lock him up in a detention camp, like Alligator Alcatraz?
Seems to me, if your existence is going to be meaningless, getting locked up in a detention camp wouldn’t be the worst thing.
Nowadays, we hardly ever push boulders uphill, only to have the boulder roll back down. We have heavy machinery to handle that type of thing. But we do engage in activities that can feel equally meaningless. There are times when the job of writing humor columns here in the Daily Post makes me think of Sisyphus, sympathetically. I get one column written and posted, and then it’s time to write another one.
Do the columns roll back downhill after I write them? Of course not. But they do disappear into the Daily Post archives, with little chance they will ever be seen again.
The Greeks weren’t the only culture that celebrated meaningless labor. In a traditional Chinese legend dating back to at least the Tang dynasty, a man named Wu Gang (traditional Chinese: 吳剛) is tasked with endlessly cutting down a self-healing osmanthus tree on the Moon. No matter how many times he chops the tree down, it grows back.
Wu Gang is not presented as clever in some versions of the story, the same way Sisyphus was clever. In fact, Wu Gang seems greedy and lazy. Why he keeps chopping the tree, we will never know. At the risk of repeating myself, I would choose the detention camp.
In modern Chinese, the phrase “Wu Gang chopping the tree” (吳剛伐桂; wúgāng-fáguì) is used to describe any endless, meaningless toil. Negotiating tariffs might fall into that category.
How Wu Gang arrived on the Moon, I cannot say. Nor can I explain how Sisyphus arrived in the Underworld. These things happened a long time ago, and certain details have been forgotten.
On the other hand, I could easily tell the story of how I got my job writing for the Daily Post.
But that might come across as “Success Bombing”.
Underrated writer Louis Cannon grew up in the vast American West, although his ex-wife, given the slightest opportunity, will deny that he ever grew up at all. You can read more stories on his Substack account.