One thing that’s always captivated me about the Muses — those mythical sources of inspiration and creativity — is this notion that their mother, Mnemosyne, is the Greek goddess of memory.

(Their father, in case you were wondering, is Zeus, but that’s a whole other story, and one that we won’t get into today.)

I just find it so fascinating that the mythologers of Ancient Greece would have made such a connection, would have forged a link between the faculties of memory and creativity. After all, to do so suggests that, in their view, you couldn’t get inspiration (the Muses) without first having something from which to be inspired by (Mnemosyne). In other words, you couldn’t get inspired unless you first had a store of memories from which that inspiration could come.

I certainly find that to be true in my own life, find that my outputs will dry up rather quickly if I haven’t been cultivating enough inputs. And it makes me wonder if perhaps this is why we’ll often feel so unsatisfied, so creatively unfulfilled after spending time on social media, hitting ‘like’ or ‘love’ or ‘favourite’ as we thumb our way from one post to the next.

Part of the reason why we do that in the first place, I think, is because we like to believe that there’s some utility coming from this exercise, some inspiration or insight to be gained from looking at and commenting on what other people have done or contributed or created. And I agree: there certainly is something of value to be gained from the time we spend on those platforms. What I’m wondering, though, is whether we’re really getting quite so much out of those hours and days spent refreshing those feeds as we might imagine.

After all, as this Greek myth which tells us that the Muses are the daughters of the memory goddess would suggest, we’re not actually building upon our own stores of experience — our own stores of memories — during the time we spend on social media, or at least not to the extent that we like to think we are. Because, really, we’re mainly just scrolling through the artifacts of other people’s experiences, other people’s memories, other people’s caches of creativity.

More than that, though, we’re also giving up the time we could have used to do that, time we could have used to accumulate our own memories, making it all the more difficult for us to call forth the Muses the next time we find ourselves needing them.

Waving from my desk,
– J