People be like

"Heaven would get boring eventually."

 

"Yep, we can imagine Sisyphus happy."

 

Both these views are false and contradictory.

 

Starting with the contradiction, if you think heaven, a literal paradise, would eventually get boring after trillions of years to the point where life becomes not worth living, then how much sooner would the same be true if you were stuck doing nothing but re-rolling a boulder up a hill for eternity?

And yet folks say that Sisyphus is meant to be this metaphor that we shouldn't look for meaning in our lives, because we won't find any, and instead rebel against the meaninglessness of life by living in spite of it, or living because of it. The struggle itself is enough to "fill the heart" and by finding meaning in your determination, you rise "above the gods" who cursed you to your fate.

 

It sounds contradictory to me: you're finding meaning (reasons to live) in the struggle against meaninglessness (pointlessness of living). Either meaning was there all along, in which case the struggle is misguided, or meaning is impossible, in which case the struggle is futile. You'd have to say that it's exactly the struggle against meaninglessness that is, paradoxically, the only way to generate meaning. But why would only that be capable of generating real meaning? Surely there are many things we do that give us compelling reasons to live.

 

We obviously cannot imagine Sisyphus happy, unless Sisyphus is so irrational or mentally damaged that he can be happy with living a hellish existence.

 

If you really find yourself in a Sisyphean existence, then there are only two rational options: 1) Change your life. 2) End your life.

 

There is no victory in misery. If you're really that miserable, but your ego prevents you from rejecting life because that would mean losing some sense of victory, and so you extend your misery, then ironically you lose all the more.

 

Plus, by viewing death as a pure loss, you set yourself up to lose eventually. I've argued elsewhere we shouldn't guarantee our failure in this way, that we can share in death's victory.

 

The vast majority of people either don't have a Sisyphean existence to begin with, or they strive toward option (1) and reject option (2).

 

The idea that "we shouldn't look for meaning in our lives, because we won't find any" is false. There is objective meaning. More specifically, there are objectively good reasons to live. More specifically, there are smart, rational, intellectually virtuous, well-informed ("fully rational") individuals who choose to live, and are fully within their epistemic rights to do so; they make no mistakes in doing so.

 

To say there are no objectively good reasons to live is to say that if someone were to live strictly according to objective truth, they would have no reason to choose to live over not living. But that's silly. Of course people have good reasons to live, and the weight of these reasons is greater than the weight of the reasons to stop living. When someone lives for their family, friends, personal goals, and what have you, these reasons appeal to fully rational individuals. One explanation for why these reasons appeal to fully rational individuals is because there's something about these reasons that connect them to reality in the right way (or: there's something about these reasons that allow them to connect people to reality).

 

Parents who have children that depend upon them have powerful, obvious reasons to live. There would be something crazy about a parent (or anyone) concluding that because the choice to live is arbitrary, they might as well toss a coin and live if it's heads or die if it's tails. As rational, reasons-sensitive creatures, we consider the pros and cons of living and, clearly, the pros tend to win out.

 

So when I say "Life is objectively meaningful", I mean "When someone says there are no objectively good reasons to live, they say something false."

Of course, there are cases where the reasons to stop living do outweigh the reasons to live, like in the case of Sisyphus where someone is stuck in a hellish existence with no way out. But again, most of us simply do not have lives that are like that. I do acknowledge that there are existential, nihilistic, pessimistic considerations in favor of rejecting life. These put pressure on people to consider ending their life. But that pressure clashes with the pressure to live, such as one's innate biological instincts and one's desire to be happy.

 

Turning to the idea of heaven being boring eventually, this is a straightforward failure of imagination. We have no reason to think God would be bored or could be bored. It's not fitting for a perfect being to be vulnerable to boredom. So we have an example of one being, God, who lives forever and yet never suffers from boredom. If we become more and more godlike in heaven over time, then our resistance to boredom increases asymptotically.

 

Even then, you might argue that because we never truly reach God's perfection, we have the tiniest sliver of vulnerability to boredom, which will eventually be exploited after enough googols of years have passed. Or, you might say that we don't become godlike overtime but stay close to our earthly forms. But that brings me to the next point: even if we don't "become gods" or anything like that, we certainly would be massively changed by the Beatific Vision. For God to prevent us from causing evil, he would have to radically change us, which could happen naturally through our new heavenly environment. Many of the evils that take place on earth (really, all of them) occur because of the laws of nature and how they give rise to laws of biology, survival pressures, social pressures, scarcity of resources, and so on. In a fundamentally different ecosystem, these pressures would not exist, and so we naturally would be shaped into radically different beings. Perhaps we become immune to boredom.

Third point, heaven itself will be radically different from earth. While living in our universe may become unbearable eventually, there's no reason to think this would be the case in a radically different kind of world.

 

Fourth point, if it's simply a worry of running out of things to do, then we could imagine a world where there's an infinite number of meaningful things to do. Imagine explaining to a mayfly how long humans live. "Eighty years?! What on earth do they do with all that time??" There's a lot of things we can do that simpler animals have no conception of. In our heavenly bodies and heavenly world, we could gain access to entire dimensions of activity that we had no conception of before, so that what is a day to our 80 years is like our 80 years to 2.34 million years. Add on a never ending number of dimensions (either literally, as in spatial and temporal dimensions, or figuratively as in layers of complexity in life) and you can get a never ending amount of meaningful activities to do.

 

Fifth point, I suppose the worry is that we are in constant need of novelty, and eventually novelty will be gone. This could be fixed in a number of ways. As mentioned, we could become the kind of creatures that simply do not need novelty. Or we need it and we have an actual infinite amount of it available to us. Or we need it and God resets our knowledge at the right time. We could live multiple lives, only remembering the previous life, while having access to the memories of lives before that if we wish to remember them (such as through something like the pensieve in Harry Potter). With an infinite number of meaningful lives to live, we would never run out of meaning.

 

Or if our lives must become truly unbearable somehow (I don't see how), and there was no way to fix this, then God could end our lives at that point. Heaven would still be (nearly) infinitely better than earth, even in this case.

 

As depressing as it is to say, I think we often fail to realize just how dreary, boring, limited, and painful the real world is compared to better worlds we can imagine. We're so steeped in this world, and so deprived of experiencing different worlds, that it's hard to imagine what a different one would be like.

 

But when I try, I can imagine a world so good to live in that members of that world always prefer being alive and always are alive. (If we can prefer being alive in a world as mediocre as ours, how much more would we feel this way in heaven?) Even something as simple as laying on the ground and looking at the night sky could be so beautiful that we could see ourselves doing even just that forever, not to mention all the more glorious things we could do, like traveling through galaxies and colonizing planets.