Last week, a small, almost trivial complaint set off a larger argument. A college student associated with Turning Point USA remarked that a campus burrito now costs twenty dollars. The observation was modest, almost offhand: that basic things are too expensive. Within hours, the comment had drawn in conservative columnists, the Vice President, and finally Representative Dan Crenshaw.
Crenshaw’s response was characteristically unsparing. He called the entire debate “dumb,” said he wanted to anger “the losers on social media before going to bed,” and then delivered the line that received the most attention: “Stop whining, get a job, eat Ramen as the rest of us did in college, on a budget with 4 roommates.” The market, he added, does not care what anyone thinks something “should” cost. Only communists care about that.
The backlash was immediate. Younger conservatives, in particular, heard in the post not tough love but a kind of remote contempt. Whether or not one agrees with the economic diagnosis, the rhetorical posture itself raised a deeper question: what kind of speech actually sustains people through an elongated trial, and what kind merely isolates them further? What type of response builds up and trains someone, and what tears them down?
As I sat with the exchange, the story of Sisyphus came unbidden to mind. The myth does not speak about rhetoric or formation, but it does present a clear picture of solitary endurance—and that picture can still instruct us.
Camus recovers the myth with a cold, clear eye. The gods have condemned Sisyphus to roll a boulder up a mountain solely to watch it tumble back down for all eternity. There is no progress, no summit that can be held, no final rest. The labor is pure repetition without remainder. Camus refuses every sentimental escape. He will not allow us the comfort of believing the task is secretly meaningful or that some hidden compensation waits at the top. The absurd is the confrontation between the human hunger for meaning and a world that answers with silence. Yet in the face of that silence, Camus insists on a kind of heroic lucidity. Sisyphus must descend the mountain each time, fully aware of the futility, and in that awareness he becomes greater than his rock. “One must imagine Sisyphus happy,” Camus writes, because the consciousness of the absurd is itself a form of revolt. Happiness is not joy; it is the hard-won dignity of a man who has stripped away every illusion and continues.
Notice what this vision still requires: solitude. The happiness Camus grants Sisyphus is a solitary achievement. No one shares the slope. No one takes a turn with the stone. The speech that arrives from outside the myth—whether from the gods who condemned him or from the observers who lecture him—remains the speech of those who do not themselves roll. It can praise endurance, demand toughness, or mock complaint, but it never enters the weight. That is why the rhetoric of detached “hard love” so often lands as Zeus-speech. It can diagnose weakness from a safe height and tell the climber to stop whining and handle his own shit—as many conservative leaders were quick to do—yet it never once puts a shoulder to the stone. The boulder remains solely his. The hill remains solely his. Even the happiness Camus imagines is a happiness purchased by accepting that aloneness is final.
Now set the New Testament beside the same mountain.
The Christian claim is not that the boulder is lighter or the hill shorter. The New Testament is unsparing about the reality of the weight. “In the world you will have tribulation,” Jesus says. Paul speaks of being “hard pressed on every side,” of carrying “the death of Jesus” in the body, of laboring “more abundantly than they all.” The Cross itself is the ultimate boulder—heavy enough to crush the One who carries it. There is no denial of the elongated trial. What changes is the identity of the One found on the slope?
The Word becomes flesh and dwells among us (John 1:14). He does not remain on the ridgeline issuing commands. He empties Himself, takes the form of a servant, and is found in the likeness of men (Philippians 2:7). He is not a spectator of human exhaustion; He is “tempted in every way as we are, yet without sin,” so that He can sympathize with our weaknesses (Hebrews 4:15). When He says, “Come to Me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28), the invitation is not abstract encouragement. It is the speech of Someone who has already taken the same yoke and is still taking it. The rest He offers is not the cancellation of the climb; it is the discovery that the climb is no longer solitary. “Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ” (Galatians 6:2) is possible only because Christ has first borne the burden that none of us could carry alone.
This is the decisive difference. Camus’ Sisyphus achieves a kind of greatness by refusing consolation and continuing anyway. The Christian vision does not reject that valor; it relocates it. The courage is no longer the lonely defiance of a man against an unfeeling universe. It becomes participation in a labor that has already been joined and finally completed by another. The boulder is still heavy. The descent still happens. But the climber is not abandoned to pure absurdity, because the God of the Christians has refused the posture of Zeus. Zeus descended from time to time, still retaining the privileges of divinity. The Son came down the mountain, put His shoulder to the same stone, and remained under its weight all the way to death—and beyond it.
That is the rhetoric that can actually build a bridge to a younger generation under an elongated trial. Not the speech that separates the strong from the weak, the speakers from the climbers, but the speech that becomes flesh and shares the weight. The love that merely lectures leaves Sisyphus alone with his rock. The love that becomes incarnate climbs with him, ahead of him, and at last for him.