Epicurus on Happiness

Ever since ancient times, human beings have looked to philosophy for the secret of happiness. But few have come up with more suggestive and more relevant answers than one born on Samos, a Greek island off the coast of modern Turkey, 351 years before the birth of Christ. His name was Epicurus. Very little about him has survived. All of his books have been lost across the centuries, leaving his philosophy of happiness to be reconstructed from just a few fragments. Epicurus believed that we could all find a way to be happy.

The problem was quite simply that we were looking at the wrong place. Unlike many philosophers, Epicurus’ idea of happiness sounds rather fun. He didn’t think that we should feel guilty about wanting to have an enjoyable, pleasurable life, and promised that he could show us how to. Of course, you might wonder why you need a philosopher at all to tell you how to have a good time.

We think that the key to happiness is pretty easy: it’s all about having a lot of money. So we can come to places like this and go shopping. But before we reach our wallets, Epicurus wants us to stop and think. It’s easy to imagine that money can solve everything, but can it? Epicurus was committed to a life of happiness. He loved sex, laughter and beauty, but crucially, spending his time pointing out the fact that happiness is a rather tricky issue. And a philosopher might help you find it more easily than a credit card ever could.

That Epicurus was in favor of pleasure at all shocked many of his ancient contemporaries. His philosophy became synonymous with a locust eating lifestyle. To this day, people who love luxurious eating and drinking can sometimes be described as Epicurean. In fact, that’s a complete misunderstanding. Epicurus said that pleasure was the most important thing in life, yet if we looked at the way he lived, it seemed he led a far from luxurious life. 

His house was very simple, his clothes were extremely basic. He would drink water rather than wine. He found fish was too expensive and he was happy just eating meals with bread, vegetables and a few olives. He once asked a friend ‘send me a pot of cheese so that I can have a feast whenever I like’. These were the taste of a man who described pleasure as the end of life.

At the heart of Epicurus’ philosophy is a simple thought that we aren’t very at knowing what will make us happy, that we may be powerfully drawn towards material things and be convinced that they are what we require to be happy. We are often wrong. What we want is not always what we need. Nothing shows that more starkly than our impulse to go shopping.

I like designer names. Steven is a hairdresser from Liverpool who spends all his spare time shopping. When I go in there and look at the stuff, it makes me happy. How many watches have you got? Probably 10. What’s the one you are wearing now? it’s 99 pounds. Steven often goes into debt. I couldn’t help but wonder his desire to go shopping might be a bit out of control.  What’s the fancy watch? What’s the craziest thing you bought in terms of bad impulse buying?

A pair of shorts. They don’t have my size. You put them on. They just look truly horrendous. Like cycling shorts. How much do they cost? 50 pounds. These jeans still got the labels on. They are too big. I don’t like taking things back. Do you ever go home and feel you are surrounded by shopping bags, god what do I do with all these? Yeah you wonder why I spend all out and at the end of the month the credit card bills come. You wonder why I spend all out?

In a way, we are all like Steven, people who shop too much. Epicurus thought he knew why: we don’t really understand what we really need and so fall prey to manic substitute desires, for huge numbers of ill-fitting trousers or countless pairs of shoes. But Epicurus declared that he had discovered what we did need. And luckily for anyone without much money, the ingredients for happiness come pretty cheap. And the first ingredient we need is friends. Epicurus thought the idea of friendship very seriously, so serious that he made a radical innovation.

When he came to Athens at 360BC at age 35, he bought a large house, just outside the city of Athens. In this place here which was called--The Garden. Of course, at that time, it was rather beautiful, much more beautiful than it is now, where it seems to be a taxi graveyard. What he did was he bought this house and asked a group of friends to move in with him. The house was quite large and there were rooms enough for everyone to have their quarters, at the same time, to have meals and have conversations in the common room of the house.

What Epicurus was doing was speaking up on a rather common-sense point, which is friends are a major source of happiness. But what was distinctive was his idea that in order to really benefit from friends, you had to see them not just occasionally for a drink at a bar, or a chat on the phone, but you had to live with these friends at all time so they’ll be your permanent companions. And I think that was his distinctive idea of happiness.

You wouldn’t catch Epicurus devouring a lunch on his own at burger bar. He recommended we try never even to eat a snack alone. Before you eat or drink anything, he said, consider carefully who you eat or drink with rather than what you eat or drink. Feeding without a friend is the life of a lion or a wolf.

The second thing Epicurus thought we need to be happy is freedom. In order to achieve it, he and his friends decided to leave Athens together. For them, to be free meant to be financially independent, economically self-sufficient, not answerable to horrible bosses for their income, so they resolved to leave city life and its competitive and gossipy atmosphere behind them once and for all.

So they left Athens and started what could be best described as a commune. We must free ourselves from the prison of everyday life in politics, Epicurus wrote. That’s precisely what he did. The life was simple but at least they enjoyed their freedom. They didn’t mind if they looked shabby or didn’t have as much money as other people, because they were self-sufficient and had gained independence from what other people thought. There was in the financial sense nothing to prove.

Epicurus believed there was a third ingredient necessary for happiness and that was an analyzed life, by which he meant we take time off to reflect on our worries, to analyze what is troubling us. Our anxieties diminish if we give ourselves time to think through. And to do that, we need to take a step back from the distraction of the noisy commercial world and to find time and space for a quiet thinking about our lives.

Of course, having loads of money has never made anyone unhappy, but a lovely idea from Epicurus is that if you are denied money for whatever reason and yet you have his three goods, that is you’ve got friends, you’ve got an analyzed life and you are self-sufficient. Then, you’ll never be denied happiness. And conversely, if you’ve got loads of money, but you are lacking friends and you haven’t got a self-sufficient life, you are not doing a lot of analyzing, then you’ll never be happy, according to Epicurus.

If we try and draw the relationship between happiness and money on a graph, imagine on the side of the graph you’ve got levels of happiness, how happy you are. And on this side, you’ve got levels of income. And for Epicurus, for so long as you’ve got enough money to provide you with the essentials of life, you can start to be happy fairly early on if you have his three goods. And you won’t get happier the more money you accumulate. Level of happiness stays pretty steady.

However, if you’ve got loads of money, but you haven’t got any friends, you are not self-sufficient, you got loads of anxieties, then your level of happiness is going to stay very flat. And I think that’s a lovely consoling idea for anyone who is either worried about they may lose their money or is denied the chance to make any.

But if the ingredients of happiness are so simple, why aren’t more of us actually happy. Epicurus blamed advertising. As we’ve just seen, advertising can be enormously seductive. It tends to make us feel there are all sorts of things missing from our lives. But Epicurus insisted that we only need three things to be happy: friends, freedom and an analyzed life.

If he is right, why then do we need to shop so much? Epicurus’ answer would be that the commercial world slightly associates the things it wants to sell to us with the things it knows that we need. So for example, this might persuade us to buy the Bacardi but only by blurring the fact that it is the friends that we are looking for. This one tries to sell us perfume by naming it after the thing we are all after—freedom. And this one flaunts whiskey by promising the calm resolution of our problems that only an analyzed life could bring us.

And it is this blurring of our desires that makes us confused about what it is that we want. What is the most thing that makes happy? The people around me, if they are happy, then I’m happy. If work is going good, then that makes me happy. But do you ever wonder if I threw all these away and just concentrated on getting the work right, getting the family and friends right, you would never need to go to shopping centers again. Yeah if I’m happy, I don’t need to chill myself out by shopping.

At the moment, I’m fairly happy. I’m not shopping quite as much as I used to. Epicurus may have lived more two thousand years ago but he would have understood the pressures that made people like Steve shop so much, and he had a bold and practical solution to counter them. And the place to find it is here in a dusty and remote corner of southwestern Turkey.

That Epicurus should still speak to us at all is something of a miracle, as every one of the 350 books he wrote had been lost, but his philosophy developed into some kind of creed, almost like a religion, and remained popular for some 400 years. Epicurean communities like were found in places like this all across the ancient world. And it’s largely thanks to them that fragments of what Epicurus wrote survived.

I’ve come with the local archeologist to see the ruins of an ancient town which was once home for 25 thousand people, a place with a lavish theater, a busy marketplace, and a huge aqueduct. It was also home to a follower of Epicurus’ philosophy, one of the wealthiest citizens of the town. Around the AD 120s, the rich man took a highly unusual decision: he paid for an enormous wall to be put up as part of a giant structure known as Stoa, on which he had inscribed Epicurus’ entire philosophy of happiness, as all the citizens in town could learn and be inspired by it.

This is beginning of the inscription where the reason of putting up the wall is explained. There were too many people for him to educate personally, and so the stone was put up. In order to live wisely, it isn’t enough to just read a philosophical argument once or twice. We need constant reminders of it, or we’ll forget.

When we are encouraged to go shopping by bright lights and inviting displays, we quickly lose sight of our true desires. So we have to counteract the influence of advertising and create advertisements which say what we really do need. And that’s why Diogenes put up his wall. The massive limestone wall which originally stood next to the marketplace of the town. Inhabitants shopping in the boutiques were warned to expect little happiness from the activity.

Luxurious food and drinks, said one fragment, in no way protect you from harm. Wealth beyond what is natural has no more use than an overflowing container. Real value is not generated by theaters or bars, perfumes or ointments, but by philosophy. The wall may have crumbled into ruin but movingly, the ideas inscribed on it retained their life and relevance.

It strikes me as a paradox where you have people shopping and, on the wall, you got reminders that shopping is not necessarily going to make you happy. The inscription was written in red so you could really see it from the other side of the market. You could see this basically an advertisement for Epicureanism on the wall.

I must have been a beautiful spot. I mean not only philosophy enlightening but also the beautiful view onto the surrounding countryside. I could imagine it would be easier to be wise here. I would have done less shopping if I had this wall, this surrounding. It’s a pity they didn’t do it more and they don’t do it today. I think it’s a lovely idea. Wall philosophy.

If Epicurus and his followers had been alive today, they wouldn’t have been sniffy about advertising. They would have enlisted it for their own end. For the same reason that Diogenes built his wall to counter the constant inducements to go shopping with some equally visible inducement for living philosophically.

The first idea was to try some ironic statements. I’ve come to the kind of place where an Epicureans might have turned, the offices of the advertising agency, to get some ideas for creating modern public reminders of how to live wisely. The first idea their creative team came up with was a sarcastic campaign, satirizing the materialist messages. Be happy with shopping, TV, and a yearly holiday. I love that. That really does sum it all up.

And you have shops selling these products and this stark reminder that you are probably not going to fill any void. Take luxury items and undermine them and show them to be shallow and empty inside. Take an image of a lovely beautiful house. Using the language of advertising. The caveat of ‘batteries not included’ and just change it to ‘happiness not included’.

I like that. It summed it up here. That you could be happy, but it’s not included here. It’s not saying you won’t be happy, which would sound like Marxism. It warns that you better watch out before you spend all your energy trying to get this house.

Unfortunately, philosophers have rarely had much money for advertising campaigns. But imagine a world where instead of being surrounded by adverts selling you watches, cars or fancy holidays, these ads remind you how to value friends to escape the rat race or reflect on your problems, didn’t just use these genuinely nice things to sell your aftershaves. It’s hard to know whether people discovered what they did need and ceased buying what didn’t because of the giant advertisement in their midst. But Epicurus’ core message, if anything, seems more relevant to today’s consumer society than it did to his own. There is no reason to believe that happiness is any more included in the many more things we can buy.

Of course, putting up one poster in the traffic center couldn’t on its own turn back the tide of consumerism. Although shoppers seemed to be interested in what my ad was trying to say, I didn’t see much evidence of people stopping shopping. But the fact remains: we are horrible confused about what could make us happy. If we really knew what we needed, there would be few things that we’d be desperate to buy.

Epicurus makes us think very carefully about the merits of our society. Of course, these societies are enormously wealth and we can buy anything we wanted in a place like this, colorful shops selling wonderfully produced goods and yet, what Epicurus wants us to think is do places like this provide us with the key ingredients of happiness. And he thought and I think he was right that they don’t. happiness may be difficult to attain, Epicurus admitted that, but he insisted that the obstacles are not primarily financial.