What We Lost When We Stopped Imagining

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Woman with a cabbage over her face

There’s something not just pitiful but deeply unsettling in witnessing someone living in squalor — a life marked by poverty and neglect. For some, that sight stirs compassion; for others, it stirs disgust.

Compassion says, “We can help. With our agency, we can end this suffering.” Disgust says, “If we get too close, we’ll be infected by it.” Whatever the instinctive response, most people agree that to be lifted from squalor is more humane than to remain in it. What’s debated, always, is how much the individual’s own agency has to do with their escape.

We all know the saying: Give a man a fish and he eats for a day; teach a man to fish and he’ll eat for a lifetime. It’s true, of course — but only if the man actually believes in the virtue of fishing. And that means more than just baiting the hook and casting the line. It means accepting the quiet monotony of staying the course when the fish aren’t biting. It means working not for the reward, but for the virtue that labour itself brings.

There’s an old Greek tale about a man named Sisyphus who was punished by the gods to roll a boulder up a hill, only to have it roll back down again. His punishment would end when the boulder reached the top — but the hill’s peak was a cruel illusion, always followed by a fall. And so Sisyphus rolls his stone day after day, lifetime after lifetime, without rest or reprieve. Each morning begins with hope, and each night ends with the familiar crash of the boulder tumbling back into the valley.

How does he keep going? Does he continue out of fear of a worse punishment? Out of duty? Out of pride? Or perhaps, more hauntingly, to sustain the relationship he has with the gods — to keep the story going?

We are all Sisyphus, in one way or another. Each of us has our Sisyphean responsibilities — the endless tasks that sustain not just our lives, but the narrative we live inside. We moderns don’t appease gods anymore; that would seem absurd. We’ve long since discarded them, the way a builder abandons scaffolding once the structure is complete. Ask the occupants of the finished building about the scaffolding, and they’ll scoff: “What, and cover up the painted facade? Never.”

So it is with us and the divine. We keep the narrative but trade out its characters. We’ve replaced the gods with our possessions, our ambitions, and our lifestyles. We forget that we were once creatures who rose from the squalor of bare life — from the brutish state of nature itself.

Through imagination, we once built meaning. We transformed fear into ritual, hunger into art, and survival into story. But somewhere along the way, we began to believe that imagination itself was no longer necessary. We convinced ourselves we had transcended nature, when really, we only built taller walls to keep it out.

We no longer chase food or flee predators, but we still hunger. We still fear. We no longer pray to gods for satisfaction, but we still worship desire in all its modern disguises. We’ve lifted ourselves from the squalor of the natural world — but in doing so, we’ve neglected the imagination that first lifted us there.

We no longer imagine. We react.

Perhaps the true task, then, is not to escape the hill or curse the stone, but to rediscover the imagination that first gave the hill meaning. The tragedy of modern life isn’t that we labour — it’s that we no longer see the poetry in our labour. We have mistaken freedom for comfort and forgotten that imagination is what once lifted us from the squalor of bare existence. The work, as it always was, is to imagine again — to choose our own burden, name it, and in naming it, redeem it.. P