🖼️ Monday Muse
The Monday Muse is a weekly collection of reminders, insights, and maxims on the art of living. The term “muse” has two meanings: (1) a state of deep thought; and (2) a source of inspiration. May the following (in a small way) be a source of contemplation and wisdom to live your highest good.
📌 Perennial Reminder(s)
The French historian and philosopher René Girard (1923—2015) on mimetic desire:
We learn what to want from each other, and our desires spread contagiously because we copy each other, hoping the people we admire hold the magic key to success and happiness. The more we imitate each other, the more we become the same – and it is our sameness, not our differences, that makes us fight. …
As a rule, mimetic competition makes people unhappy. … Within a highly mimetic world, the only objects we desire intensely are those that a rival prevents us from possessing. And the converse is also true: we quickly lose interest in objects that nobody wishes to take from us. […]
Source: All Desire is a Desire for Being
📜 Perennial Maxim(s)
The French philosopher and historian Pierre Hadot (1922—2010) on happiness:
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💡 Perennial Insight(s)
The English author and journalist Helen Russell (a previous podcast guest) on the message of sadness:
As the Danish philosopher Kierkegaard writes: there is ‘bliss in melancholy and sadness’ and researchers from the University of New South Wales have found that accepting and allowing for temporary sadness helps to improve our attention to detail, increases perseverance, promotes generosity and even makes us more grateful for what we’ve got. Sadness has a point. It can tell us when something is wrong, if we let it. Sadness is the temporary emotion that we all feel on occasions when we’ve been hurt or something is wrong in our lives. It is a message.
We depend on each other to survive as a species and sadness is the emotion that makes us remember this—because the most common ways to avoid sadness are really ways to avoid feeling. […]
Source: How to Be Sad
💀 Dying Every Day
The Stoic philosopher Seneca (4 BC—65 AD) on living rightly: “We should strive not to live long but to live rightly; for to achieve a long life, you need Fate only, but for right living, you need the soul.”
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Thank you for reading; I hope you found something useful.
Until next time, be wise and be well,
J.W. Bertolotti
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