Camus and the Absurdity of Patch Management

Albert Camus spent his career grappling with the fundamental meaninglessness of human existence. He wrote The Myth of Sisyphus, won a Nobel Prize, and became one of the most celebrated philosophers of the twentieth century. He never worked in IT, but if he had, patch management would have finished him off.

I’m only half joking.

The Absurd, Briefly Explained (So We Can Get to the Good Stuff)

Camus’s central idea was what he called the absurd: the collision between our desperate human need for order, meaning, and closure, and a universe that responds to that need with complete, crushing silence.

We want things to make sense. The universe does not care.

He illustrates this with the myth of Sisyphus, a figure from Greek mythology condemned by the gods to roll a boulder up a hill for eternity. Every time Sisyphus reaches the top, the boulder rolls back down. He trudges back to the bottom, picks it up again, and starts over. Forever. No progress. No finish line. No meaning.

Camus’s radical move was to say: this is fine, actually. Not fine in a dead-eyed, nihilistic way; fine in a defiant, eyes-open, fully-human way. Sisyphus knows the boulder will roll back. He rolls it anyway. He owns the struggle. He becomes the struggle.

“One must imagine Sisyphus happy,” Camus concludes.

I’d like to suggest that one must also imagine the sysadmin happy. It’s harder, but hear me out.

Patch Tuesday Is Just Sisyphus with a CVSS Score

Here is a typical patch management cycle, rendered faithfully:

1. Spend three weeks patching everything in your environment.
2. Reboot servers at 2am on a Saturday like some kind of caffeinated ghost.
3. Feel a brief, flickering sense of accomplishment.
4. Open your vulnerability scanner on Monday morning.
5. Discover 73 new critical CVEs published over the weekend.
6. Repeat until retirement or existential collapse, whichever comes first. There is no “done.” There is no version of this story where you patch the last thing, close the laptop, and ride off into a secure sunset. The boulder is always waiting at the bottom of the hill. The hill is, inexplicably, getting steeper.

This is not a solvable problem. It is a condition of existence, at least if your existence involves running software, which — congratulations — it does.

Camus would look at your vulnerability dashboard and nod slowly. “Yes,” he would say. “This is the absurd.” Then he would probably light a cigarette, because it was the 1950s and everyone did that.

The Three Wrong Ways to Respond

Camus identified a few ways people respond to the absurd, and most of them are, in his view, cowardly. Let’s map them onto patch management, because why not.

Philosophical Suicide: The False Hope

This is when you cope by inventing a lie that makes the problem seem solvable. In patch management, it sounds like:

• “We just need a better vulnerability management tool.”
• “Once we finish this remediation sprint, we’ll be in good shape.”
• “We’ll get to a place where we’re fully patched and then just do maintenance.” These are comforting stories. They are not true. No tool, no sprint, no initiative will ever produce a state of “fully patched” that lasts longer than about forty-eight hours. The moment you believe otherwise, you’ve checked out of reality and into a pleasant fiction.

Camus calls this philosophical suicide because you’ve killed off the honest part of yourself that can see things clearly. The boulder is still rolling. You’ve just stopped watching.

Physical Suicide: Giving Up Entirely

This one is more literal in the security world, it’s patch fatigue taken to its logical extreme. You stop trying. Alerts pile up unacknowledged. The CVSS scores blur together. You develop a thousand-yard stare and start saying things like “we’re already compromised anyway” at standup meetings.

This is not a philosophy. This is a cry for help wrapped in a Jira ticket.

Camus rejects this too. Giving up is just another way of refusing to face the absurd honestly. The boulder doesn’t go away because you stopped pushing it. It just crushes you.

Rebellion: The Correct Answer (Camus Says So)

The third response — the one Camus actually endorses — is rebellion. Not rage-quitting, not theatrical despair, but a clear-eyed, defiant refusal to pretend the problem is other than it is.

You see the boulder. You know it will roll back. You push it anyway, not because you expect to win, but because the pushing itself is the point. The work has value even without a final destination. The craft matters even when the finish line keeps moving.

This is, it turns out, what good security people actually do.

The Absurdist Sysadmin

The security professional who has made peace with the absurd looks something like this:

They prioritize ruthlessly. Not everything can be patched immediately, and pretending otherwise is the philosophical suicide move. They triage by exploitability, by asset criticality, by exposure. They make deliberate decisions about what to tackle first and why. They are not chasing a perfect score; they are managing risk intelligently.

They document everything. Not because it will ever be done, but because the record of the work has its own value. Future-you will thank present-you. Future-auditors will also thank present-you, though with less warmth.

They don’t catastrophize the backlog. A thousand unpatched vulnerabilities is not a moral failing. It is Tuesday. The absurdist sysadmin looks at the backlog and thinks: right, where do we start? Not: we are doomed and nothing matters.

They find craft in the process. There is genuine satisfaction in a clean patch run, in a well-written remediation report, in a vulnerability closed before it could be exploited. These small victories don’t solve the underlying condition — but Camus would say that’s fine. The victory doesn’t need to be final to be real.

They have a dark sense of humor. This one is load-bearing. If you cannot laugh at the fact that a critical zero-day dropped the morning after your change freeze started, you will not survive this career. The absurdist laughs at the boulder. The boulder, notably, does not laugh back. That’s its problem.

“One Must Imagine the Sysadmin Happy”

Here’s the thing Camus actually got right, underneath all the cigarettes and existential dread: the struggle itself is where meaning lives. Not in completion. Not in victory. In the act of showing up, doing the work, and refusing to be defeated by the fundamental unfairness of it all.

The vulnerability scanner will always have findings. The CVEs will keep coming. Vendors will keep shipping software with the structural integrity of wet cardboard. Patch Tuesday will arrive every month like an unwelcome houseguest who doesn’t take hints.

And every month, you’ll patch. You’ll prioritize, triage, test, deploy, reboot, document, and close out what you can. And it will be enough — not because it solves the problem, but because you did it anyway.

Sisyphus, Camus tells us, owns his fate. The boulder is his boulder. The hill is his hill. The struggle is, paradoxically, the point.

The patch backlog is yours. The scanner findings are yours. The 2am reboots and the emergency out-of-band updates and the frantic Slack messages when a new zero-day drops — all yours.

One must imagine the sysadmin happy.

(Alternatively, one must imagine the sysadmin heavily caffeinated and muttering darkly, which is close enough.)