A lot of times, I'll scroll through the Internet, looking through what I can do differently to make me a better boyfriend, friend, Christian, son, brother, and teacher. I rub my eyes, with the sobering reminder that I've read all this advice and these "life hacks" before. I've tried them time and time again, only to not succeed, like I'm in some Coldplay song.

I want to be fixed. I don't want to be the mess I am every day, and I don't want to let so many people down on a daily basis. I want to stop feeling so tired, so overwhelmed, so incompetent, and so much like an imposter on a daily basis.

A life hack is defined as "any trick, shortcut, skill, or novelty method that increases productivity and efficiency, in all walks of life." To me, however, a life hack has always meant so much more than that. The connotation of the phrase means that it's a way to fix life and a way to find a solution to all of your problems, and a life hack, to me, has always been perceived as some sort of panacea for all of our suffering.

Some life hacks that I have personally brought into were to wake up at the same time every day, to wash your face with cold water, to take cold showers, to get 8-9 hours a sleep a night, to stop eating processed foods, to stop using my phone before bed, to limit the amount of time I spend around electronics. I even once brought into online forums that not masturbating was going to make me a superhero who had more energy, confidence, and motivation.

I will not deny that some "hacks" like sleeping more, taking cold showers, and limiting my use of electronics before make me go through my day better. But no matter what I do to try to improve myself, my relationships, or my simple day to day living, I am still the same person, with the same problems. I am not fixed. I am still broken. I am still a mess.

I have problems with the whole idea of a life hack because it presumes that we are projects to be fixed if we have to hack our lives, instead of messy people with emotions and needs. I chafe at the idea that I need to be fixed because I am a work in progress, not someone who can have a wand magically cure me of all my problems.

Where you are now is where you were meant to be by design. And I don't mean design as God's plan for your life, but more so that design meaning that everything in your life led you to where you are now.

This is your journey, and that means the bumps and uphill battles as much as it does the triumphant successes. Life is a roller coaster, and so your life is meant to be a journey through the rough patches as much as the successes.

A life hack is snake oil, meant to sell you a product that's designed to fix everything about you in one fell swoop. Nothing will have that fixing power. Nothing will cure all things in your life on this Earth.

Even if you're religious, even as a Christian like myself, I recognize that my God is worried about a lot more than the menial problems I worry about every day, that if He wants to make my life all better and put more money in my wallet and give fruit to all my relationships, that is Prosperity Gospel, not Christianity. For even the religious, 99% of life is still unexplained and uncertain.

I look to the postmodern life of Sisyphus as the most common analogy for why life hacks don't work, for what our daily toil truly is. Albert Camus authored a piece title "The Myth of Sisyphus" to outline his philosophy of absurdism. He related the life of Sisyphus, after he tricked and offended Hades, to the life of all of us today. For Sisyphus's sin in offending and defying Hades, Sisyphus is forced to push a rock up a mountain. Every time, the rock goes up the mountain, it rolls back down. Sisyphus gets no reward for a labor of endless toil.

Life, sometimes, feels like this Sisyphean effort. We push a rock up a mountain, only to get back where we started. All the time, we're back to square one, stuck in a never ending cycle where it seems like nothing is getting better, where there is no point in doing the same difficult task over and over again with no reward.

For Camus, Sisyphus's life embodied the absurdity of life. We push a rock up a mountain every day, and we learn to love it, because even if there's no point, we move on. Camus believed we should fly full force into life's meaninglessness and absurdity, and that we should immerse ourselves in life's pointlessness.

But for the absurd philosophy of Camus, pushing the rock up the mountain with its challenges and repetition is more reward than it is punishment. A life hack would get us over the mountain, but we never truly get over the mountain. Each day lends us a different rock with a different texture, and we have to find novel ways to push it up. Some days we're more tired, while other days we have more energy.

No life hack is going to fix us or make the rock go over the mountain. But maybe the act of pushing the rock up the mountain every day is our purpose and where the joy in our lives comes from. It is in seeing the joy in pushing the rocks that we can be free of being people who need fixing.