Why Shouldn't We Commit Suicide? (Donkey Kong & The Myth of Sisyphus)

In one sentence: This entry in Wisecrack's 8-Bit Philosophy series uses the original Donkey Kong as its screen and Camus's The Myth of Sisyphus as its script — life is absurd, but Camus's answer to that is the opposite of what the title implies: not a case for ending it, but for rolling the rock back up anyway, on purpose, and seeing what that choice does to you.

Premise and Big Questions

8-Bit Philosophy is the shortest thing Wisecrack makes: one retro game as backdrop, one philosopher's single big question, compressed into three or four minutes — the game is the canvas, the philosophy is the actual content. This episode's canvas is the 1981 arcade original, Donkey Kong. It opens cold with its question: why shouldn't we kill ourselves? Albert Camus, the French-Algerian philosopher, calls deciding whether to commit suicide "the only serious philosophical question" in The Myth of Sisyphus. His answer starts from a claim about life itself: it's absurd — not tragic, not silly, but a permanent mismatch between what we expect from it and what it actually hands back. Most days that gap stays buried under habit. Then some ordinary or dramatic moment tears it back open, and you see it plainly. (Worth stating up front, given the title: Camus's own conclusion here is a full-throated argument for staying alive.)

The Philosophy Hiding Underneath

Camus reaches for an old Greek myth to nail the point down: Sisyphus, punished for thinking himself cleverer than the gods, is condemned to push a boulder up a mountain forever — every time he nears the top, it rolls back down, and he starts over. The video plugs this straight into the game: Mario can dodge a thousand fireballs and grab every umbrella on screen, but none of it means anything if he never actually reaches Pauline (Donkey Kong's original damsel, years before Princess Peach existed). Human life, Camus argues, has the same shape — no finish line that retroactively justifies the climb.

Faced with that, Camus rules out two exits before landing on his own. The religious one: follow Kierkegaard's move and fold the absurd into some larger divine plan. His objection isn't that this is false so much as that it's an evasion — it distracts you from the world you actually have to live in. The other exit is suicide, and here Camus is blunt: it is never the answer, because killing yourself doesn't solve the problem, it just cancels it. What's left is the harder path — chain yourself to the absurd on purpose, choose to stay inside it rather than looking for comfort in some other, better world, and answer your condemned situation with revolt and with making things. As the rock rolls back down the mountain one more time, Camus asks us to picture Sisyphus happy — it's the act of revolt itself, not any hope of finally reaching the top, that manufactures meaning inside an otherwise pointless punishment. What ought to matter, the video closes by asking, is the act of creating itself.

Quotable Lines

The captions here are manually uploaded, not auto-generated, and the whole episode is a single scripted voiceover — there's no read-aloud excerpt from Camus's actual book the way the Kierkegaard episode reads from The Concept of Anxiety. The lines below are the video's own script, except where it puts a phrase in quotation marks as a direct nod to Camus.

"Deciding whether or not to commit suicide, Camus thinks, is 'the only serious philosophical question.'" — video narration, citing Camus's The Myth of Sisyphus

"Suicide is NEVER the answer. For killing yourself only negates the problem rather than solving it." — video narration

"Mario may jump over a thousand fireballs and collect all of the umbrellas—but none of that matters if he never saves Pauline." — video narration

"Camus asks that we imagine Sisyphus happy, in this act Sisyphus revolts and thereby creates meaning in his absurd punishment." — video narration

Cross-Domain Connections

Honest read: the acquired domain is corporate history, and the science domain is NPR's Short Wave science digest — nothing in either currently touches absurdism, Camus, or the ethics of suicide, so there's no real overlap to claim there.

Within humanities, two connections are worth keeping. First, the video names Kierkegaard directly — "follow Kierkegaard's move and fold the absurd into some larger divine plan" — the same Kierkegaard at the center of 焦虑是自由的眩晕：克尔凯郭尔为什么说焦虑对你有好处. Both thinkers stare into the same groundlessness and refuse to look away, but walk out of it in opposite directions: Kierkegaard's leap of faith versus Camus's clear-eyed revolt. Second, 《一拳超人》的哲学：一拳打赢全世界，为什么反而更空虚 is close to a mirror image of this one — Saitama gets to skip all the struggle and ends up hollowed out, lining up with Masahiro Morioka's argument that a frictionless, painless existence quietly drains meaning out of living. This episode arrives at nearly the same conclusion from the opposite extreme: Sisyphus's punishment is never solvable, and it's precisely because it can't be solved and has to be pushed anyway that revolt and creation get anywhere to land. Effortless and futile turn out to be two roads to the same insight — meaning lives in how you meet the process, not in the outcome.

Those two connections, plus the existing 存在主义，藏在你看的每部片里 theme page (which already threads together the anxiety, Soul, One-Punch Man, Coco, and Good Place episodes), make this a natural candidate for a future sixth entry there — updating that page is outside the scope of what's being produced here.

Pages Worth Building

• albert-camus — Albert Camus, this episode's central figure, French-Algerian philosopher and novelist, author of The Myth of Sisyphus and The Stranger, the defining voice of absurdism; worth a standalone entity page (currently a dangling link).

Source · wisecrack