About

Me Trying to Live a Normal Productive Life, also known as Monk Temptation or Lead Us Not Into Temptation, refers to a painting of a monk praying, eyes closed and head to the sky, while a woman in the background tries to tempt him. The image saw use in image macro memes and as an exploitable image labeling format in 2017.

Origin

In 2011, comic artist Milo Manara released a series of erotic paintings based on the poetry of Jean de La Fontaine.^[1] Among these paintings is one depicting a monk standing with hands folded and eyes closed, head to the sky, praying as a woman who appears to be a prostitute tries to tempt him in the background with her dress up, exposing herself (shown below). On May 24th, 2014, a version of the image with heightened resolution was uploaded to WordPress^[2] blog desenhaporra.

Spread

The earliest example of the image as a meme is an image macro posted to Reddit and Imgur^[3] prior to March 21st, 2017, reading, "When you tryna be a child of God but she nasty and impure and keeps teasing you tryna lure you into her trap," but the user and post have since been deleted (shown below, left). The image was re-uploaded to iFunny^[4] on December 19th of the same year. On April 8th, 2017, tonestradamus posted the image unlabeled to Twitter^[5] along with the caption, "When you came over to discuss systemic racism and womens rights issues and she keeps telling you to get undressed" garnering over 1,800 likes and 1,400 retweets in 3 years (shown below, right)

Elon Musk's Usage of Meme

On February 18th, 2020, cryptoIaurianna posted a version of the image to Twitter^[6] with the label "Bitcoin" on the woman and the text "me trying to live a normal productive life" on the monk, garnering over 1,200 likes and 130 retweets in 10 months. This is the earliest example of the image as a labeling format. On December 20th, Elon Musk then tweeted^[7] the same image, garnering over 366,000 likes and 41,000 retweets (shown below). Musk's repost subsequently sparked interest and further spread of the format shortly after.

On November 21st, 2022, Elon Musk then posted another version of the Temptation meme, this time concerning the reinstatement of Donald Trump on Twitter (seen below) and the "temptation" for the former President to use the platform rather than his own Truth Social, receiving over 875,000 likes in a single day.^[8]

Various Examples

Search Interest

Unavailable.

External References