The Absurdity of the Gig Economy

The notification flashes on your phone. A ping. A buzz. An offer. A disembodied voice from the algorithmic cloud requests your service. "A passenger is waiting." "An order is ready for pickup." You tap "Accept." You get in your car. You drive, you deliver, you drop off. The transaction is complete. A small sum of money appears in your digital wallet. And then… another ping. Another offer. Another trip. The day unfolds as a series of discrete, repetitive, and seemingly endless tasks, each one erasing the last.

Welcome to the gig economy. It was sold to us with the promise of ultimate freedom. "Be your own boss," the slogans said. "Set your own hours." "Work when you want." For millions of people, driving for Uber, delivering for DoorDash, or performing tasks on countless other platforms has become a primary source of income or a necessary side hustle. But for many, the promised freedom feels strangely like a cage. It’s a hamster wheel of constant motion that never seems to lead anywhere—no promotions, no raises, no career path, just the perpetual, anxious hunt for the next gig.

It's a uniquely modern form of drudgery, one that can feel profoundly meaningless. And if you’ve ever sat in your car between deliveries, staring at the app, wondering, "What is the point of all this?" then you are grappling with one of the most fundamental problems in philosophy. You are having an existential crisis. And there is no better guide for this particular crisis than the philosopher of the absurd himself: Albert Camus.

Meet Albert Camus. A French-Algerian writer, philosopher, and Nobel laureate, Camus was a key figure in 20th-century existentialism, though he himself rejected the label. He wasn't interested in dusty, abstract arguments. He was concerned with the raw, lived experience of being human in a world that stubbornly refuses to make sense. His most famous philosophical essay, The Myth of Sisyphus, is not a solution to this problem, but a clear-eyed, courageous diagnosis of it.

The Absurd: A Universe That Doesn't Answer Back

At the heart of Camus's philosophy is a single, powerful concept: the Absurd. The Absurd is not the world itself, nor is it the human mind. It is the clash between the two. It is the unbridgeable gulf between our innate, desperate human need to find meaning, reason, and order in the universe, and the universe’s cold, silent, and unreasonable indifference to that need. We shout our questions into the void—"What is my purpose? Why is there suffering? What is the meaning of it all?"—and the void offers no reply.

For Camus, this clash is the defining feature of the human condition. To live is to be in a constant state of confrontation with the Absurd. The worst thing we can do, he argued, is to deny it. We can’t escape the Absurd through blind faith in a religion that promises a higher meaning (that’s "philosophical suicide"), nor can we escape it by giving up on life altogether (that’s literal suicide). The only noble path is to live with our eyes wide open, to confront the Absurd head-on, without hope or illusion, and to rebel against it.

To illustrate this, Camus turns to an ancient Greek myth.

Sisyphus: The Ultimate Absurd Hero

You know the story. Sisyphus was a king who, for his hubris and his trickery of the gods, was condemned to an eternity of futile labor. His punishment was to push a massive boulder up a steep hill, only to watch it roll back down to the bottom the moment he reached the summit. He would then have to trudge back down the hill and begin the agonizing process all over again. Forever.

It is the perfect metaphor for a meaningless life. His work is pointless, repetitive, and without any hope of completion or success. He toils with the full knowledge that his efforts will amount to nothing. Sisyphus is the ultimate Absurd Hero, a man trapped in a pointless cosmic chore.

And now, let’s look back at the gig economy worker. The driver who completes a ride only to be immediately returned to the bottom of the "mountain," waiting for the next ping. The delivery person who finishes a drop-off, their task immediately erased, their reward a few dollars that barely cover the cost of gas. The work is a series of disconnected loops, with no sense of progress or accumulation. There is no summit, no final achievement. There is only the endless cycle of the next task. The algorithm is the cruel, indifferent god, and the worker is the modern-day Sisyphus.

"One Must Imagine Sisyphus Happy"

This is where Camus makes his most audacious and revolutionary move. After painting this bleak picture of eternal, pointless toil, he ends his essay with a startling conclusion: "The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy."

Happy? How could a man condemned to such a fate possibly be happy?

For Camus, Sisyphus’s happiness comes not from his work, but from his consciousness of his fate and his rebellion against it. The crucial moment is not the struggle up the hill. It is the walk back down. As he descends, his body no longer straining against the rock, Sisyphus is free to think. He is lucid. He knows the full extent of his wretched condition. There are no illusions. And in this lucidity, he finds his freedom.

He knows the gods cannot do anything worse to him. He understands the absurdity of his situation. And by consciously choosing to walk back down and push the rock again, he robs the punishment of its power. He makes the rock his thing. His fate belongs to him. "His scorn of the gods, his hatred of death, and his passion for life won him that unspeakable penalty in which the whole being is exerted toward accomplishing nothing," Camus writes. This conscious, defiant rebellion in the face of utter futility is his victory. He is happy because he is free in his mind, the one place the gods cannot touch.

Finding Rebellion in the Driver's Seat

Can the gig worker, our modern Sisyphus, achieve this same absurd happiness?

The system is designed to prevent it. The app is designed to keep you in a state of constant, anxious motion, to eliminate the contemplative walk back down the hill. The pings are relentless. The metrics, the ratings, the "surge pricing"—all are designed to keep you chasing the next task, to prevent you from stopping to think about the absurdity of the whole enterprise.

But the rebellion is still possible. It doesn't mean quitting the job. Like Sisyphus, the worker is bound to their rock. The rebellion is a shift in consciousness. It is the Uber driver who, between rides, turns off the app for ten minutes to read a book of poetry. It is the DoorDash courier who consciously chooses to end their day at a set time, refusing the lure of one last "good" order, thus asserting their own will over the algorithm's. It is the worker who sees the system for what it is—an indifferent, absurd machine—and refuses to grant it the power to define their worth or their happiness.

This "happiness" is not the cheerful, smiling happiness of the platform's advertisements. It is a grim, hard-won, and deeply personal freedom. It is the freedom that comes from looking the absurdity of your situation directly in the eye and choosing to pick up your rock anyway, on your own terms. It is the realization that if the work is meaningless, then you are free to find meaning elsewhere—in the conversation with a passenger, in the beauty of the city at night, in the simple, defiant act of being a human being inside the machine.

A Happy Hustle?

Camus does not offer a solution to exploitation. He would not deny that the gig economy can be a brutal and precarious system. His philosophy is not a justification for bad labor practices.

Instead, he offers a tool for spiritual survival within that system. He tells us that even in the most seemingly meaningless of circumstances, we possess a final, inviolable freedom: the freedom to choose our attitude toward our fate. The gig economy, like Sisyphus's punishment, is an absurd condition. But for Camus, the recognition of absurdity is not an end point, but a starting point.

It is the beginning of a life lived in rebellion, a life where meaning is not something you find, but something you create, moment by moment, in your defiant struggle against a silent universe. So, is the person hustling for the next delivery happy? Perhaps not in the way we usually mean. But in their lucid, conscious, and rebellious confrontation with their daily boulder, one must imagine they can be free.