Tidying up after the kids is a Sisyphean task.
a Sisyphean task
idiomA task that is endless and futile, because it must be repeated forever without ever being finished.
Origin
Sisyphus was a king famous for his cunning — so clever that he twice cheated death itself. When the god of the dead came to fetch him, Sisyphus tricked him and put him in chains, so that for a while no one on earth could die at all. When at last he was dragged down to the underworld, he talked his way back up to the living world with a lie and lived on for years more.
The gods do not forgive being outwitted. When death finally claimed him for good, they devised a punishment shaped precisely to his crime. He had thought himself cleverer than the gods; now they would set him a task with no end and no escape, forever.
They gave him a boulder and a hill. His sentence was simply to roll the great stone up to the summit. And so he set his shoulder to it and heaved, straining, sweating, the rock grinding upward inch by inch through the whole long climb toward the top.
But the stone was cursed. Each time Sisyphus neared the summit, the boulder slipped from his grip and went crashing all the way back down to the plain — and he had no choice but to trudge down after it and begin again. Up and down, up and down, for all eternity, with nothing ever finished and nothing ever gained.
A Sisyphean task, then, is any labour like his: endless, exhausting, and futile — work that must be done over and over again and can never, ever be completed.
Clearing his inbox felt like a Sisyphean task, since a dozen new emails arrived for every one he answered.
Moderating the platform became a Sisyphean task: every account the team removed was replaced overnight by two more, so the work simply rolled back down the hill each morning.
The land of the dead — its rivers, its judges, and its eternal punishments.
- 01
crossing the Styx (idiom)
Passing a point of no return, especially into death or an irreversible change.
the river of no return
- 02
to descend into Hades (idiom)
To enter a dark, frightening, or hopeless situation, often to face something you dread.
down among the dead
- 03
drinking from Lethe (idiom)
To forget completely, as if wiping away all memory of something.
the water of forgetting
- 04
tantalize (word)
To tease someone by offering or showing something they want, then keeping it just out of reach.
punished just out of reach
- 05
the Fates have spoken (idiom)
A decision has been made that cannot be changed, as if it were destiny.
the thread that cannot be undone