Hermann Hesse on Breaking the Trance of Busyness

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July 2, 2023

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I would simply like to reclaim an old and, alas, quite unfashionable private formula: Moderate enjoyment is double enjoyment. And: Do not overlook the little joys!

- Hermann Hesse -

Hermann Hesse on Breaking the Trance of Busyness

"We reflexively blame on the Internet our corrosive compulsion for doing at the cost of being, forgetting that every technology is a symptom and not, or at least not at first, a cause of our desires and pathologies. Our intentions are the basic infrastructure of our lives, out of which all of our inventions and actions arise. Any real relief from our self-inflicted maladies, therefore, must come not from combatting the symptoms but from inquiring into and rewiring the causes that have tilted the human spirit toward those pathologies -- causes as evident to Kierkegaard long ago as to any contemporary person who crumbles into bed at night having completed the day's lengthy to-do list yet feeling like a thoroughly incomplete human being. How to heal that aching spirit is what Hermann Hesse (July 2, 1877-August 9, 1962) addresses in a spectacular 1905 essay titled "On Little Joys,"" Maria Popova shares more... { read more }