The worst part of work today is that nothing feels built to last

The legend of Sisyphus goes like this: As punishment for cheating death and embarrassing the gods, he is banished to the underworld and sentenced to push a boulder up a hill. As Sisyphus nears the peak, the boulder rolls back down, and he must start over. And the episode repeats for eternity. 

I risk sounding melodramatic by comparing this story to the plight of the employed in 2026. Fair enough. But consider, if you will, the cycles in which a modern worker finds herself.

She masters a new skill, and it’s deemed outdated. She learns a new software, and is told to use a different one. She gets a new boss, and the company is reorganized. She applies for a job, and gets no response. She lands a new job, and the job is dissolved.

The dark core of the story of Sisyphus is not that his toil is repetitive or even that it’s eternal. It’s that the work is erased as soon as it’s done. The punishment—apparently the worst that the Greek gods could think of—is to accomplish nothing.

If our skills and our jobs and the fruits of our labor are simply meaningless, are we not also climbing that hill with our own boulders?

The problem of change fatigue

Change fatigue is just that: fatigue. This has been studied, quite extensively, by psychologists.

A 2024 long-term study of more than 50,000 workers in Germany found that organizational changes—like reorgs, layoffs, outsourcing, and mergers—are linked to things like sleep disturbance, nervousness, tiredness, and depression, and that the more changes an individual undergoes, the more likely they are to have these symptoms. “Organizational change is often implemented at the cost of employees’ working conditions and health,” the researchers conclude.

Dutch academics studied the effects of repeated changes in a big European bank (they wouldn’t say which one) and found that the more change that workers experienced, the more likely they were to feel change fatigue. And the more fatigued they felt, the more likely they were to resist the next change. The more resistant employees became, the less likely it was that the company’s changes would succeed. 

But even those who supported the goals of the change were just as resistant as their unsupportive coworkers. The problem wasn’t the change itself; it was the knowledge that another change would come along right after it, wiping out the last. The company couldn’t be trusted. Says the employee to the employer: It’s not me; it’s you.

A 2026 report from McLean & Company called change fatigue “an operational nightmare.” The scholars who studied the relationship between repetitive changes and employee resistance likened executives’ tendency to reorganize to a gambling habit.

When there is no achievement—only work

Work is becoming less repetitive. Automation and reorgs and reskilling mean that what we did yesterday, or the way we did it, is not what we’ll do tomorrow. Software engineers don’t have to write every line of code, recruiters don’t have to review every application, and customer service reps no longer have to review and tag every ticket—an AI agent can do all of that.

So the ennui felt in the modern workplace is not the result of tedium, but of constant change that wipes out the progress of the individual. Why climb yet another hill only to find yourself at the bottom again? There is no achievement—only work. 

In 1942’s The Myth of Sisyphus, philosopher Albert Camus describes two natural responses to the meaninglessness of toil: that the suffering will either redeem or defeat. But he prescribes something else: defiance.

Camus believed that the most important part of the story is when Sisyphus descends the hill, fully aware of the useless task ahead. What is he thinking? “One must imagine Sisyphus happy,” he writes, not glibly. Happy, because he recognizes how absurd his situation is. Happy, because he is free from illusion. 

That’s Camus’ definition of defiance. Defiance for the 21st century worker may be rejecting the illusion that work must be meaningful to make the worker meaningful. 

The gods in the myth of Sisyphus demanded the climb. Today’s gods demand the climb, but also the method, the enthusiasm, and the willingness to pretend it will last. 

They should not be surprised when workers stop pretending.