Worklife: Saudade

Observation about the [dis]integration of work and life

“The wisdom of the melancholy attitude (as opposed to the bitter or angry one) lies in the understanding that we have not been singled out; that our suffering belongs to humanity in general. Melancholy is marked by an impersonal take on suffering. It is filled with pity for the human condition.

There are melancholy landscapes and melancholy pieces of music, melancholy poems and melancholy times of day. In them, we find echoes of our own griefs, returned back to us without some of the personal associations that, when they first struck us, made them particularly agonising.

The task of culture is to turn both rage and its disguised twin, jolliness, into melancholy.

The more melancholy a culture can be, the less its individual members need to be persecuted by their own failures, lost illusions and regrets.”

The School of Life. 'Essential Ideas