Welcome to The Sisyphus Effect Podcast!
My name is Sean Edward Watkins and I am the creator and host of this podcast. As an over educated person with a desire to do something creative with my time on Earth, I decided that a podcast was the way to go.
In order to understand just why I am doing a podcast, we should go back in time a bit. I grew up in a small town in northern New York. My father, an avid music fan and collector, introduced me to a world of music that spanned everything from Doo-wop to Dianna Ross. My childhood was spent listening to the Beatles at full blast while my dad spent hours compiling lists of all the individual songs that he owned. With the lists, he would create some of the most beautifully arranged mixed tapes for his family and friends. My father and I had a strained relationship, but we did come together under music. In our "Music Room", we would sit side by side and I slowly learned the proper skills and rules to the creation of mixed tapes.
The Music Room's focal point was dad's equipment that was housed on top of a custom desk that he had built specifically to fill his needs. To his immediate left was all of his records that were within easy reach on a shelf that he had also built. Directly in front of him were two turn tables, a mixer, a reel-to-reel, a receiver, three large tape players, and later a CD player. The desk was like his cockpit and he knew the significance and purpose of every knob and lever. Dad would spend hours and hours creating mixes that were essentially live. If your needle moved by accident as you were starting a record 45 minutes into the mix, you had to start over. Perfection was key to this game.
In that environment, as hard as I sometimes tried, I couldn't fight the love of music and sound. The music was one of the few ways to relate to my dad and so I took the opportunity to both learn a lot about technology and try and connect with my distant father. On both accounts, I succeeded in some ways and failed in others.
So, the foundation for this podcast comes from those days of watching someone create something for free for others simply for the love of sharing. I am fascinated by podcasts because people spend so many hours putting them together when they are fully aware that they probably will make very little or no money from it. The goal is to create and to share.
The Sisyphus Effect's comes from the story of Sisyphus. In the myth, the gods condemn a man to push a boulder up a mountain for all time. When Sisyphus gets to the top, the rock tumbles down and he has to start over. One could interpret this as an allegory of the meaninglessness of life. Why do we struggle? What is the point? Albert Camus has something to say about this (you can look that up on your own), and I choose to interpret the myth differently. I like to think of Sisyphus as someone who is struggling for meaning, someone who is searching for something that may be unattainable. However, the journey itself is what is important and the audience of that journey gets to choose their own meaning and interpretation.
My interviews on this podcast represent our search for meaning and truth in our lives. Join me as my guests and I search for meaning.
I would be remiss of me to ignore all of the podcasts who have come before me that inspired The Sisyphus Effect. I have long listened to many including: WTF with Marc Maron, The Nerdist, This American Life (which is a radio show, I know!), Doug Loves Movies, How Did This Get Made?, the 40 Year Old Boy, Savage Love, Fatman on Batman, and others. Check those out, and if you really like them, you should probably donate a few dollars to their cause.
