Our Authentic Stories

Sweet Bites for April 25, 2025

Mind Candy is a newsletter on practical philosophy and human flourishment—aka how to live “the good life.” Each month we tackle a new theme.

This month we’re exploring the theme of Story.

Welcome to another edition of Sweet Bites, Mind Candy’s bite-sized newsletter with thought-provoking finds to send you into the weekend with.

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🍰 Mini Bite

The stories we’re telling aren’t always apparent to us, yet they have a way of surfacing in the work we do.

After making Close Encounters of the Third Kind, James Lipton asked Steven Spielberg about a realization he had while watching the film:

“Your father was a computer scientist, your mother was a musician. When the spaceship lands, how do they [humans and aliens] communicate?… They make music on their computers and they are able to to speak to each other.”.

Spielberg, who documented his parent’s relationship in his film The Fablemans, smiled suddenly realizing what he’d done.

“I’d love to say I realized that and I intended that with my mother and father, but not until this moment.”

“Our life is the creation of our minds, and we do much of that creating with metaphor,” writes Jonathan Haidt.

We’re not always aware of the stories we’re telling. And sometimes that’s okay, we are writing that story for a reason. There is something within us that the story speaks to, that helps us, that heals us.

“We see new things in terms of things we already understand: Life is a journey, an argument is a war, the mind is a rider on an elephant. With the wrong metaphor we are deluded; with no metaphor we are blind.”

Sometimes the most important stories we’re trying to tell are the ones that give us the relief we never knew we needed.

🧘🏻This Week’s Monday Meditation

🦉 This Week’s Wednesday Wisdom

📰 Article Worthy of a Read

These Are the Stories We Tell Ourselves by Carolyn Roy-Bornstein M.D.

Writing stories, both mentally and lhysicisllg, is how we draw meaning in life. It’s how we come to understand the events we experience and the setbacks we face. It’s how we shape our character and in turn our lives.

In this piece, Roy-Bornstein takes a personal story, one that many of us know or will experience, and explores how stories help guide us through the hardest times.

“Writing gives us a way of processing events, contextualizing interactions. It is not just the fact that something stressful happened to us or the fact that we bore witness to great suffering that causes us to suffer. It is our emotional reaction to it that must be considered on the page.”

📖 Book Recommendation

Existentialism is a Humanism by Jean-Paul Sartre

A good introduction Sartre’s belief that existence proceeds essence, this work originally started as a lecture and is printed in book format along with some Q&A from post-lecture and a review of Albert Camus’ The Stranger.

📚 Wisdom

“Each page, each sentence, makes a fresh demand on the powers of invention . .. Creation is adventure, it is youth and liberty.”

Simone de Beauvoir

Source: How to be Authentic

🎥 Video to Watch

If you feel like diving deeper into Jean-Paul Sartre’s philosophy on authenticity and don’t want to read Being and Nothingness, School of Life has put together this quick video to better understand this theory.

💭 Thought to Reflect On

I came across this quote from Aaron Sorkin and had to stop snd really think about it for a while. We think in narratives, many of us even think in dialogue, or our own personal movie. But is this right? What are the advantages and disadvantages to doing so?

🎬 Film to Watch and Reflect On

Dramatic, comedic, and thought-provoking, The Truman Show asks us to question our own reality and the stories we inherit. How do we know what is truth? How do we know that we experience is real? How can we trust those closest to us?

The trailer is below:

Think someone you know would enjoy these? Hit below to forward and spread the love.

Until next time,

D.A. DiGerolamo

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