A term you'll meet in Greek mythology and Camus's The Myth of Sisyphus.
A Sisyphean task is one that can never be finished — endless, repetitive labor that produces nothing, no matter how much effort goes into it. The word comes from Sisyphus, a king in Greek mythology condemned by the gods to push a boulder up a mountain forever; every time he nears the top, it rolls back to the bottom, and he has to start again.
Different ancient sources disagree on exactly what Sisyphus did to deserve eternal torment — accounts include cheating death, chaining up Thanatos (Death itself), or betraying Zeus's secrets — but they agree on the sentence: an eternity of identical, fruitless effort. Homer mentions him briefly in the underworld in the Odyssey; by the time the myth reaches its most famous modern treatment, the specific crime barely matters. What matters is the shape of the punishment: labor with structurally guaranteed failure, repeated without end.
Albert Camus's 1942 philosophical essay The Myth of Sisyphus takes this bleakest possible image and turns it into an argument for living anyway. Camus uses Sisyphus as the model for the absurd hero (see our entry on the absurd in Camus): someone fully aware that their effort is futile and the universe offers no ultimate justification for it, who nonetheless keeps pushing. The famous final line of the essay reframes the entire myth: "One must imagine Sisyphus happy."
Camus isn't claiming the boulder stops being heavy. His argument is that the moment of walking back down the mountain — after the boulder has rolled away, before the next push begins — belongs to Sisyphus alone, consciously his. Knowing the task is meaningless and choosing to do it anyway is, for Camus, the only honest response to what he calls the absurd: a universe that won't supply meaning, met by a person who refuses both false hope and despair.
Most uses of "Sisyphean" today skip Camus's optimism entirely and just mean "endlessly frustrating and pointless" — a Sisyphean inbox, a Sisyphean bureaucratic process. That's a faithful use of the original myth. But it's worth knowing that the most famous person to write about Sisyphus in the twentieth century wasn't interested in the futility at all — he was interested in what it's possible to feel while pushing anyway.
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