We Must Imagine Sisyphus Posting: on the Dangers of Popularising Philosophy
Scroll through TikTok for long enough and you will inevitably encounter philosophy. A sixty-second video explains Nietzsche’s will to power over a dramatic soundtrack. A meme reduces Camus to “we must imagine Sisyphus happy” superimposed on a photo of someone looking pensively at the horizon. Dostoevsky becomes shorthand for suffering and redemption; Kafka, an adjective. These encounters feel like philosophy — they carry the names, the quotes, sometimes even the vocabulary. But something has gone quietly missing.
This is not a complaint about attention spans, nor a lament for the death of the book. The appetite for big ideas is genuine and worth taking seriously. The problem is what feeds it.
The issue runs deeper than inaccuracy. When a psychological concept is misrepresented online, the damage is real but containable — someone misapplies a term, draws the wrong conclusion about their behaviour, perhaps resists seeking proper help. When philosophy is misrepresented, something structurally different happens: the argument disappears, and only the conclusion remains. But in philosophy, the argument is not a vehicle for the conclusion. It is the conclusion. Nietzsche’s claim that God is dead is not a provocative opinion you can agree or disagree with in a comment section. It is the endpoint of a sustained diagnosis of European modernity that requires pages, not seconds, to even approach honestly.
What TikTok philosophy produces instead is an aesthetic. Nietzsche becomes the philosopher of self-overcoming for people who have never encountered the Übermensch as a problem rather than an inspiration. Camus becomes a therapist for existential malaise rather than a thinker grappling seriously with whether life can be justified at all. Kafka becomes a mood. The thinker is absorbed into their image, and the image forecloses the encounter with the actual work.
Philosophy is not alone in suffering this fate. The popularisation of psychology on social media has produced its own catalogue of distortions — armchair diagnoses, the flattening of complex clinical concepts into personality aesthetics, the word “narcissist” deployed so broadly it has nearly lost diagnostic meaning. Attachment theory becomes a dating framework. Trauma becomes a synonym for discomfort. The consequences are not trivial: people misidentify their own experiences, resist professional help, and engage with one another through a vocabulary that feels precise but has been hollowed out.
But philosophy faces a particular vulnerability. Psychology, at least, retains a clinical anchor — there are practitioners, institutions, and diagnostic criteria that exist independently of what goes viral. Philosophy has no such institutional corrective in the public sphere. When Nietzsche is misread on TikTok, there is no philosophical equivalent of a licensed therapist to appeal to. The misreading simply circulates.
The deeper problem is not that people are reading Nietzsche wrong. It is that the format in which they encounter him makes reading him correctly nearly impossible. A sixty-second video cannot convey that Thus Spoke Zarathustra is a work of deliberate irony, that the Übermensch is not a self-help archetype but a provocation whose meaning is inseparable from its literary form. A meme cannot communicate that Camus was responding to a specific philosophical tradition — Husserl, Kierkegaard, Jaspers — and that “we must imagine Sisyphus happy” is an argument’s conclusion, not its entirety. Context is not decoration. It is the condition under which the idea becomes intelligible at all.
This is where the question of who does the popularising becomes unavoidable. The objection will come quickly: is this not simply elitism? Did philosophy not begin in public, in conversation, without credentials or institutions? The objection is fair but misses the point. The issue is not that only academics may speak about philosophy. It is that genuine engagement with a thinker — understanding the tradition they were responding to, the problems they were trying to solve, the ways their work has been received and contested — requires a kind of sustained attention that cannot be shortcut. Credentials are an imperfect proxy for that attention. What they gesture toward, though, is real: the difference between someone who has wrestled with a text and someone who has encountered its reputation.
What circulates on social media is almost always the latter. And the tragedy is not merely intellectual. A generation encountering Dostoevsky as an aesthetic of suffering, or Kafka as a synonym for bureaucratic frustration, is a generation subtly inoculated against the genuine encounter. The meme-version fills the space where curiosity might otherwise have grown.
None of this is an argument against popularising philosophy. It is an argument about how it is done and by whom. The appetite that sends someone to a Nietzsche TikTok is not the enemy — it is, in fact, exactly the kind of restless curiosity that philosophy depends on. The question is whether that appetite is fed or merely flattered.
Careful popularisation looks different from what currently dominates. It preserves the argumentative structure even when simplifying the vocabulary. It contextualises a thinker within the problems they were responding to rather than extracting their conclusions for independent use. It is honest about difficulty — willing to say that some ideas resist compression, that sitting with confusion is not a failure but the beginning of thinking. And crucially, it is done by people who have spent time inside the texts, not merely around them: who know not just what Camus concluded but why he felt the conclusion needed arguing for at all.
This kind of popularisation exists. It is found in long-form essays, in philosophy podcasts that take the time to work through an argument, in student journals that offer editorial feedback rather than just a platform. It is slower, less shareable, and less likely to go viral. That is not a flaw. That is the point.
Camus told us to imagine Sisyphus happy. It was a difficult, carefully earned conclusion — the endpoint of an essay that moved through absurdity, revolt, and the limits of philosophical suicide before arriving at that single, defiant image. It took him an entire book to justify one sentence.
That sentence now lives on thousands of phone screens, detached from every page that made it mean something.
Sisyphus rolls his rock; the caption writes itself. And somewhere, a reader who might have followed Camus all the way to that conclusion never feels the need to, because they already know how it ends.
This is what is at stake. Not the purity of philosophy, not the authority of academics, not the sanctity of difficult books. What is at stake is the encounter itself — the slow, uncomfortable, occasionally transformative experience of following an argument wherever it leads. That experience cannot be compressed. It can only be had.
