189: How To Be Happy With An Ordinary Life - Michel de Montaigne

In this podcast, we will be talking about 6 Ways To Be Happy With An Ordinary Life from the philosophy of Michel de Montaigne. Michel de Montaigne was a 16th-century French philosopher. So here are 6 Ways To Be Happy With An Ordinary Life from the philosophy of Michel de Montaigne-   01\. Stop Trying to Sound Smart 02\. No One Will Remember You  03\. It’s Okay to Be a Mess 04\. Accept Your Animal Nature 05\. Embrace the Ordinary 06\. Be Present We hope you enjoyed listening to this podcast and hope this video, from the philosophy of Montaigne, helps you to live happily. Michel de Montaigne was a 16th-century French philosopher who defined ambition not as a virtue but as an unnatural "disease of the soul" because it makes people sacrifice the life they have right now for a future that might never even happen. In 1571, right on his 38th birthday, he walked into his office and permanently resigned from his position as a judge in the Bordeaux parliament. It was exactly the kind of role Renaissance men spent their whole lives networking, scheming, and stressing out to get. He quit, moved back to his family's estate in the French countryside, and set himself up in a stone tower on the property. He built a massive library there and had 54 quotes from ancient philosophers carved into the wooden beams of his ceiling. From that point on, he spent his time studying the only subject he actually wanted to understand: himself. He observed his own habits, flaws, and everyday routines, and wrote down his thoughts about them and he called these writings Essais—which comes from the French word meaning "to try" or "to attempt" and is of course where we get the English word ‘essay’.