[CH 1] Unpopularity
p13 But it is not only the hostility of others that may prevent us from questioning the status quo. Our will to doubt can be just as powerfully sapped by an internal sense that societal conventions must have a sound basis, even if we are not sure exactly what this may be, because they have been adhered to by a great many people for a long time. It seems implausible that our society could be gravely mistaken in its beliefs and at the same time that we would be alone in noticing the fact. We stifle our doubts and follow the flock because we cannot conceive of ourselves as pioneers of hitherto unknown, difficult truth.
[CH 2] Not Having Enough Money
p55 The task of philosophy was, for Epicurus, to help us interpret our indistinct pulses of distress and desire and thereby save us from mistaken schemes for happiness.
"Pleasure is the beginning and the goal of a happy life."
―Epicurus
p56 ...the essential ingredients of pleasure, however elusive, were not very expensive.
p65 Why, then, if expensive things cannot bring us remarkable joy, are we so powerfully drawn to them? Because of an error similar to that of the migraine sufferer who drills a hole in the side of his skull: because expensive objects can feel like plausible solutions to needs we don't understand. Objects mimic in a material dimension what we require in a psychological one. We need to rearrange our minds bu are lured towards new shelves. We buy a cashmere cardigan as a substitute for the counsel of friends.
"Mankind is perpetually the victim of a pointless and futile martyrdom, fretting life away in fruitless worries through failure to realize what limit is set to acquisition and to the growth of genuine pleasure. It is this discontent that has driven life steadily onward, out to the high seas..."
― Lucretius
p72 Happiness may be difficult to attain. The obstacles are not primarily financial.
[CH 3] Consolation for Frustration
p13 But it is not only the hostility of others that may prevent us from questioning the status quo. Our will to doubt can be just as powerfully sapped by an internal sense that societal conventions must have a sound basis, even if we are not sure exactly what this may be, because they have been adhered to by a great many people for a long time. It seems implausible that our society could be gravely mistaken in its beliefs and at the same time that we would be alone in noticing the fact. We stifle our doubts and follow the flock because we cannot conceive of ourselves as pioneers of hitherto unknown, difficult truth.
[CH 2] Not Having Enough Money
p55 The task of philosophy was, for Epicurus, to help us interpret our indistinct pulses of distress and desire and thereby save us from mistaken schemes for happiness.
"Pleasure is the beginning and the goal of a happy life."
―Epicurus
p56 ...the essential ingredients of pleasure, however elusive, were not very expensive.
Happiness, an Epicurean acquisition list
- Friendship
- attachment to congenial company (try never to eat alone).
- p57 True friends do not evaluate us according to worldly criteria, it is the core self they are interested in; like ideal parents, their love for us remains unaffected by our appearance or position in the social hierarchy, and so we have no qualms in dressing in old clothes and revealing that we have made little money this year. The desire for riches should perhaps not always be understood as a simple hunger for a luxurious life, a more important motive might be the wish to be appreciated and treated nicely.
- Freedom
- accepting a simpler way of life in exchange for independence.
- distancing themselves from the values of Athens, they had ceased to judge themselves on a material basis.
- Thought
- sober analysis calmed the mind
p59 Wealth is of course unlikely ever to make anyone miserable. But the crux of Epicurus's argument is that if we have money without friends, freedom and an analyzed life, we will never be truly happy. And if we have them, but are missing the fortune, we will never be unhappy.
"Nothing satisfies the man who is not satisfied with a little."
―Epicurus
"Nothing satisfies the man who is not satisfied with a little."
―Epicurus
What is and is not essential for happiness
- Natural and necessary
- Friends
- Freedom
Though (about main sources of anxiety: death, illness, poverty, superstition)
- Food, shelter, clothes
- Natural but unnecessary
- Grand house
- Private baths
- Banquets
- Servants
- Fish, meat
- Neither natural nor necessary
- Fame
- Power
p65 Why, then, if expensive things cannot bring us remarkable joy, are we so powerfully drawn to them? Because of an error similar to that of the migraine sufferer who drills a hole in the side of his skull: because expensive objects can feel like plausible solutions to needs we don't understand. Objects mimic in a material dimension what we require in a psychological one. We need to rearrange our minds bu are lured towards new shelves. We buy a cashmere cardigan as a substitute for the counsel of friends.
"Mankind is perpetually the victim of a pointless and futile martyrdom, fretting life away in fruitless worries through failure to realize what limit is set to acquisition and to the growth of genuine pleasure. It is this discontent that has driven life steadily onward, out to the high seas..."
― Lucretius
p72 Happiness may be difficult to attain. The obstacles are not primarily financial.
[CH 3] Consolation for Frustration
A Senecan dictionary of frustration
Though the terrain of frustration may be vast -- from a stubbed toe to an untimely death -- at the heart of every frustration lies a basic structure: the collision of a wish with an unyielding reality. p80
A single idea recurs throughout his work: that we best endure those frustrations which we have prepared ourselves for and understand and are hurt most by those we least expected and cannot fathom. Philosophy must reconcile us to the true dimensions of reality, and so spare us, if not frustration itself, then at least its panoply of pernicious accompanying emotions.
Her task is to prepare for our wishes the softest landing possible on the adamantine wall of reality. p81
1. Anger
- The ultimate infantile collision.
- A kind of madness
- The angry hereby appeal to a predominant view of the mind in which the reasoning faculty, the seat of the true self, is depicted as occasionally assaulted by passionate feelings which reason neither identifies with nor can be held responsible for. p82
- Anger does not belong in the category of involuntary physical movement, it can only break out on the back of certain rationally held ideas; if we can only change the ideas, we will change our propensity to anger. p82-83
- How badly we react to frustration is critically determined by what we think of as normal....Our frustrations are tempered by what we understand we can expect from the world, by our experience of what it is normal to hope for. p83
2. Shock
- Nothing ought to be unexpected by us. Our minds should be sent forward in advance to meet all the problems, and we should consider, not what is wont to happen, but what can happen. p88
- You say: 'I did not think it would happen.' Do you think there is anything that will not happen, when you know that it is possible to happen, when you see that it has already happened...?' p89
- We are mistaken if we believe any part of the world is exempt and safe....Nature has not created anything in such a way that it is immobile. p89
- 'the questions at issue between us [is] whether grief ought to be deep or never-ending.' Seneca p90
- There is dangerous innocence in the expectation of a future formed on the basis of probability. Any accident to which a human has been subject, however rare, however distant in time, is a possibility we must ready ourselves for. p90
- A Senecan Praemeditatio
We live in the middle of things which have all been destined to die.
Mortal have you been born, to mortals have you given birth.
Reckon on everything, expect everything. p91
3. Sense of Justice
- In cases where one acts correctly but still suffers disaster, one is left bewildered and unable to fit the event into a scheme of justice. The world seems absurd. p93
- The interventions of Fortune, whether kindly or diabolical, introduced a random element into human destinies. p95
4. Anxiety
- A condition of agitation about an uncertain situation which one both wishes will turn out for the best and fears may turn out for the worst. Typically leaves sufferers unable to derive enjoyment from supposedly pleasurable activities, cultural, sexual or social. p96
- The traditional form of comfort is reassurance. But reassurance can be the cruellest antidote to anxiety. Our rosy predictions both leave the anxious unprepared for the worst, and unwittingly imply that it would be disastrous if the worst came to pass. Seneca more wisely asks us to consider that bad things probably will occur, but adds that they are unlikely ever to be as bad as we fear. p96
- If you wish to put off all worry, assume that what you fear may happen is certainly going to happen. Seneca p97
- "Stop preventing philosophers from possessing money; no one has condemned wisdom to poverty. I will despise whatever lies in the domain of Fortune, but if a choice is offered, I will choose the better half." Seneca p98
- Stoicism does not recommend poverty; it recommends that we neither fear nor despise it. It considers wealth to be, in the technical formulation, a productum, a preferred thing -- neither an essential one nor a crime.
- Stoics are identified as wise by only one detail: how they would respond to sudden poverty. They would walk away from the house and the servants without rage or despair. p98
- "I relegated to a place from which she (Fortune) could take them back without disturbing me. Between them and me, I have kept a wide gap, and so she has merely taken them, not torn them from me." p99
