To understand Epicureanism I’d like to first start with the school’s most famous counterpart – stoicism. 

Everyone knows the Stoics. You may think stoicism, in the philosophical sense, to be about honor and decency. You may see a school of more recent, online stoics preaching the ideas of this ancient philosophy in order to deliver to you a more manageable life. There has been a resurgence of stoicism in a self-help genre which, I hope, has been helpful to many of you. 

Stoicism is a school of philosophy, founded by Zeno of Athens, which is dedicated to living a virtuous life. For stoics, happiness and pleasure are derived from virtue. In truth, stocis may not even distinguish virtue from happiness, they believe that virtue is the sole good. Stoics teach that we should strive to live virtuously, in accordance with nature, and that this is sufficient for most people. 

That is an oversimplification. If you are interested in Stoicism, I recommend following folks like Ryan Holiday, who created The Daily Stoic, and reading its most famous ancient practitioners Seneca and Epictetus. Stoicism has offered me valuable insights and perspectives that have come in handy at various times in my life. It left me feeling satisfied – in a sense. But as time went by I noticed a dissonance in my pursuit of stoic virtue and the tangible effect it had on my own enjoyment of my life. 

What I was missing was happiness! Pleasure, laughter, levity. 

I meditated often, I focused on virtue, I reasoned my way out of feeling negative emotion. But I wasn’t enjoying my life any more than I had before.

That is when, through the owner of the used book store that I worked at after college, I found Epicureanism. 

Epicurus, the founder of this school, believed that it was quite obvious that the primary pursuit of life is pleasure. Instead of aiming for virtue and hoping it leads to pleasure, Epicurus pursued pleasure and avoided pain. His school believes that pleasure and pain operate as a kind of antenna of our perceptions – steering us toward things that make us happy and away from things that don’t. He believed that we should listen to these emotional guiding sensations. 

His school was cast as hedonists that over-drank, slept around, and loafed. The truth was quite the opposite. They had a long-term perspective of happiness. For instance, getting very drunk tonight might be fun, but tomorrow will be a nightmare. That initial pleasure of drunkenness is temporary and it doesn’t outweigh the negativity that follows. True pleasure is sustainable pleasure. 

I consider myself an epicurean because I find it a simpler life model. It makes more sense to me to pursue happiness than to pursue nobility. I want to maximize my time here and enjoy every second of it. I want to live a full, active and pleasurable life. 

In fact, I think epicureanism can offer a more healthy model for us than stoicism can. Stoicism has been repackaged online, as has ‘reason’, to market to men that they should bury their emotions and embrace their pursuit of independence and masculinity. We have a crisis of toxic masculinity and I believe that stoicism is one of the many marketing hooks that is used to then reel these kids in.

Epicureanism has a vulnerability too – just look at the billionaires that have cornered the wealth of this world. Epicureanism could be used to validate a life lived in pursuit of personal happiness at the expense of everyone else. 

However, I believe that lasting pleasure cannot be derived from screwing people over. On the contrary, I believe that pleasure comes from equality. Poverty is the vilest evil, a corrosive affect on our society that rots our communities from the inside. We will not achieve true, sustainable pleasure until our neighbors do as well. 

My goal with this blog is to bring an understanding, context, and levity to our current events that is provided by epicureanism. While many epicureans believe in avoiding politics and public discourse, I think the opposite. I think we need to engage. 

Consider Thomas Jefferson, a self described epicurean, who crafted the founding document of the United States of America:

‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.’