Romanticize
Credit: Julia Roberts
It may seem like just another self-help trend, but the idea of romanticizing your life is backed by ancient wisdom that goes beyond buying pretty things.
Performative posts on social media provide ample ideas on how to make life more aesthetic, but they miss the mark. You may not have the luxury of filming yourself buying and arranging fresh flowers each day, and contentment can't be found by comparing your lifestyle to an endless stream of reels you don't have the wherewithal to recreate.
If you really want to romanticize your life, think beyond comparison and consumption. There's so much more to romanticism than buying the scented candle you saw promoted in your feed. The inspiration behind this trendy movement is actually thousands of years of philosophy that encourage mindfulness over materialism.
Resources
Articles
The Mundane Thrill of ‘Romanticizing Your Life’ (The New York Times)
To Control Your Life, Control What You Pay Attention To (Harvard Business Review)
The Curated Self (Psychology Today)
Ideas
How to find great films to watch (Psyche)
Bored with Hollywood and Netflix? Becoming an adventurous and informed explorer of the cinema world is in everyone’s grasp.
How to make matcha at home (Epicurious)
A primer on shopping, storage, techniques, and accessories necessary to make ground Japanese green tea a part of your daily routine.
Become a lady of leisure (Viveura)
A lady of leisure typically evokes an image of a non-working woman who sits around doing nothing all day. But I’m embracing a more inspiring idea of this phrase — a path of pleasure quintessential to good living.
Images
Videos
Letter-writing is not dead (The Morgan Library)
Create the perfect afternoon tea (Nicolas Fairford)
Morning routine living off-grid (Eugenia Diaz)
This is beyond cute (Pinterest)
Books
Live Beautiful by Athena Calderone
From a celebrated design expert and interior designer, comes a look into how creatives decorate their spaces. Calderone taps into her international network of interior decorators, fashion designers, and tastemakers to reveal how carefully crafted interiors come together.
The Art of Happiness by Epicurus
The teachings of Epicurus — about life and death, religion and science, physical sensation, happiness, morality, and friendship — attracted legions of adherents throughout the ancient Mediterranean world and deeply influenced later European thought.
House of Plants by Caro Langton & Rose Ray
Learn how to care for your succulents, cacti and air plants with this stylishly illustrated and practical guide to indoor plants. These gorgeous, fashionable plants are handsome, hardy and perfect for urban living, and this comprehensive companion is all you need to learn how to nurture and enjoy them, as well as how to beautifully arrange them in your home.
Quotes
Whatever is lovely, think on these things. — Biblical Proverb
And happiness is thought to depend on leisure, for we labor that we may have leisure. — Aristotle
Not what we have but what we enjoy, constitutes our abundance. — Epicurus
Let the beauty of what you love, be what you do. — Rumi
A grateful mind is a great mind which eventually attracts to itself great things. — Plato
Things turn out best for the people who make the best out of the way things turn out. — Livy
If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need. — Marcus Tullius Cicero
This is the real secret of life – to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play. — Alan Watts
Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment. — Buddha
