“Everything you possess will possess you some day”
“Alles, was du hast, hat irgendwann dich” is the page a friend of mine started on Facebook:
Find a Proven Orientation System for Living the Good Life Stress-Free
Where do we get the orientation we all need to guide us from pain to pleasure, from stress to happiness, from confusion to clarity? Who gives us what kind of orientation today in which form with what intent?
We learn very early which way to turn our face to get milk from mother’s breast or avoid a slap from mother’s hand, where to go for food, comfort, company and when to stop touching a hot stove. Our senses and our physical environment teach us what is good and healthy for us by producing a feeling of pleasure. What is bad for our health produces disgust. Pleasure and pain are the basic stop-and-go signals for our individual survival.
This would be enough if we weren’t so very social. But humans cannot survive on their own and therefore the social group will also teach us what is good and bad for the survival of the group. The group’s teachings might differ from what we learned through our direct sense feedback. Your senses tell you to devour all the food but if you don’t share it with (some of) your group members they might punish you and not share with you their food the next time.
So you learn to work out your survival strategies balancing your individual needs as felt by your drives and tastes with the group values as experienced through daily practice, learning conflict and expectation management. This is hard enough and it takes years to find your place in the group in such a way that you can still live also according to your personal drives and tastes.
Your job to find orientation will get even more difficult or even impossible if your social environment keeps on sending you ambiguous messages by, e.g., commanding you not to lie but at the same time everybody lying to you about a life after death.
As a consequence you will be disoriented and will try to work out strategies to get along within this system. You can choose to conform to the system and pretend to follow its rules, being incongruent with your own inner beliefs. Or you can choose “to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing” become incongruent with the value system and acceptable behavior patterns of your social environment. In both cases you will ruin your mental and possibly also your physical health. You will perceive the most widespread incongruities mostly as conscience conflicts and stress.
What can you do if you don’t wish stress to ruin your health and happiness? What other options can you have?
You could find a value system linked to behavior patterns and corresponding lifestyles in a congruent manner. In other words you might seek and find people who walk their talk and their thoughts, words and acts are congruent not only among themselves but they resonate with your own deepest needs as well.
I have good news for you: There is such a proven and viable model of pragmatic and easy to follow values system. It is the 2300-years-old practical Epicurean philosophy. It makes it easy to be honest and happy at the same time. It has been hushed up and defamed by the competing philosophies and worldviews of the Platonist, Stoic, Skeptic as well as Christian theoreticians and theologians but it never stopped giving simple practical orientation to reasonable, rational and honest people. For an enormously long period of 800 years, from 300 BCE till 500 CE (almost four times longer than the whole history of the US!), it was even the most widespread worldview and lifestyle of the non-fanatical, pragmatic middle class of the Greek and Roman world.
Professional philosophers mostly know how relevant Epicurean attitudes, worldview and life conduct are today and how many of our stress-related and ecological problems would be solved if we only adopted and applied them. Unfortunately they don’t know how to say all this in simple language that is understandable also for everybody. The overwhelming majority of psychologists and sociologists, educators and life coaches has either never heard about Epicureanism or if they did, they erroneously believe that it is about eating and drinking. On the other hand they are churning out ever “new” happiness recipes, as if re-inventing the wheel every week.
Epicurean happiness guidance is available for everyone who needs orientation but cannot accept childish myths or spiritual hocus-pocus supplied by organizations, groups or individuals with the aim of turning you into a docile instrument for their profit/power increasing machinery. Re-discovering the Epicurean system of values, attitudes and behaviour patterns will make you feel reborn in a friendly and sustainable world, enabling you to live in harmony with yourself and with your social and natural environment.
Follow the Proven Epicurean Pathway to Happiness by Adopting a Healthy Attitude toward Mortality
Do you fear dying? From the time we are children we hear warnings and admonitions about what happens to people after they die, especially if they have not led a “good” life. It’s no wonder so many of us have a fear of death.
Values are implanted in our brains at an early age, before we can think for ourselves. We’re taught to accept any of a variety of beliefs, depending on the cultural environment we happen to be raised in. For example:
“Your deeds will be judged after your death and you will be rewarded or punished
in heaven or hell,
- but we can help you to get from the bad place to a better place.”
- and you will be reborn as a low animal or a person of high social status.”
- and your soul will stay at a sad place.”
The feeling resulting from these interpretations may vary according to the way they were communicated and to your personality but all are based on FEAR.
We are taught to abide by the laws of our community’s belief system and behavior patterns in order to avoid punishment in the afterlife by, for example:
- paying the church tax
- helping the members of your community
- harming the members of communities presented by your parents or church leaders or other persons of authority as hostile
- performing all the rituals prescribed by your faith community
A good question to ask ourselves: “Who receives the most benefits of our performing these actions?” Why is fear of dying, and of the afterlife, instilled in us throughout our lives? Who benefits?
For Epicureans, death is as natural as blue eyes and blowing our noses, and it’s as inevitable as rain: “Against all other hazards it is possible for us to gain security for ourselves but so far as death is concerned all of us human beings inhabit a city without walls.”
The Epicureans’ basic attitude towards death is to accept the fact as an inevitable necessity: Since you cannot influence it, waste no time or energy for thoughts and feelings about it. The wise man does not deprecate life nor does he fear the cessation of life.
The immediate effect of this attitude is to invest the present with a pressing urgency and to demand the control of experience with respect to the past, the present, and the future. This amounts to the control our own thoughts. A choice of attitude is involved: The past is to be regarded as unalterable, the future as undependable, and the present alone as within our power.
The feeling resulting from the Epicurean attitude towards death is a liberating and invigorating acceptance and enjoyment of life lived without fear.
The actions resulting from the liberating feeling can be to live our life as long as we are alive (vivamus dum vivimus) and stop postponing it: “We are born once and we cannot be born twice but for all time must be no more; and you, thou fool, though not master of the morrow, postpone the hour and each and every one of us goes to death with excuses on his lips.” This is the unpleasant consequence of procrastination and misdirected activity.
Our precious life is not to be wasted with preparation for or administration of it: “Some men devote their lives to accumulating the wherewithal for living, failing to discern that the potion mixed for all of us at birth is a draught of death.”
To achieve happiness, we must act promptly and vigorously and live “in contemplation of mortality.” Living in contemplation of death is living more consciously, intensively and enjoyably. In Epicurus’s words: “Accustom yourself to believing that death is nothing to us, for good and evil imply the capacity for sensation, and death is the privation of all sentience; therefore a correct understanding that death is nothing to us makes the mortality of life enjoyable, not by adding to life a limitless time, but by taking away the yearning after immortality. For life has no terrors for him who has thoroughly understood that there are no terrors for him in ceasing to live.”
Are you afraid of dying because it might be painful? Sure, there’s a chance it might be, but the pain you’ve experienced from a migraine headache, a broken bone, a gunshot wound, or a hammer pounded on your head may have been worse. And if you suffer from a painful disease before you die, or you’re badly injured in a car accident, there are drugs to help alleviate the pain and keep you comfortable. We don’t have to bite on bullets anymore. In Epicurus’s words: “Foolish, therefore, is the man who says that he fears death, not because it will pain when it comes, but because it pains in the prospect. Whatever causes no annoyance when it is present, causes only a groundless pain in the expectation. Death, therefore, the most awful of evils, is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death is not come, and, when death is come, we are not. It is nothing, then, either to the living or to the dead, for with the living it is not and the dead exist no longer.”
Are you afraid of dying because you’re worried about what will become of your children? Some of what happens to your children after your death is under your control, such as their living arrangements and legal guardianship; and some can be influenced by you in advance, for example by preparing them emotionally or helping to boost their self-confidence and independence. Besides, your staying alive is no guarantee that harm will never befall them.
Not the quantity but the quality of life is important: “And even as men choose of food not merely and simply the larger portion, but the more pleasant, so the wise seek to enjoy the time which is most pleasant and not merely that which is longest.”
What other elements of dying do you fear? If you can exert some control over them, make the decision to figure out how to take charge. If you can’t, worrying, or even thinking, about them won’t make a smidgeon of difference in how events finally play out. Fearing death makes you fear to live your life to the full. Are you sure you don’t really want to live your unique life to the full? So why not accept your mortality and put the fear behind you forever?
Satisfy Your Need for Subsistence by Following an Ancient Pathway Towards Stress-freedom
Did you know that unsatisfied needs cause stress and pain? Have you heard about a 2,300-year-old tried and true method for choosing happiness-boosting satisfiers instead of happiness-busters?
I define need as a condition requiring relief; anything that is necessary but lacking. To avoid stress and pain people must satisfy their needs. Fundamental needs are universal, that is, the same in all cultures throughout the ages. We all have the same fundamental needs for subsistence, protection, affection, understanding, participation, identity, freedom and transcendence.
Need-satisfiers may vary among cultures and times, but one aspect is universal: The way in which we satisfy our needs can boost or bust our happiness. Oxygen, nutrition, shelter, clothing and sleep are satisfiers of the fundamental need for subsistence. What kind of nutrition, shelter or clothing we use to satisfy our need for subsistence varies largely from culture to culture and from individual to individual.
We all need the six major classes of nutrients: carbohydrates, fats, minerals, protein, vitamins and water. What we eat, however, is largely determined by the perceived palatability of foods. A simple diet of water and bread, fruits and vegetables is easy and cheap to obtain. Stress results when we adopt ideas (prompted by our family, friends, authorities or the all-pervasive advertising industry) that only a certain kind of sweetened and carbonated beverage can quench our thirst or only expensive and sophisticated dishes satiate our hunger.
Working long hours and getting stressed by peers, supervisors and customers can be the result of a false belief in having to pay the mortgages for a house which is far bigger than needed for sheltering us from the frost or heat. And billions of dollars are made by another industry entirely based on our inappropriate estimation of our needs and our false belief that we may obtain happiness through status: the fashion industry.
Hundreds of scientific studies furnish thousands of proofs for the rightness of an ancient philosophical school whose members dedicated their lives to the pursuit of happiness: the happiness-school communities of the Epicureans that flourished for 800 years between 300 BC and 500 AD in the Greek-Roman world. Their recipe was simple: The good life is a simple life lead in the safe circle of like-minded friends, satisfying our natural needs in a simple and appropriate manner. Their pathway to happiness was to follow simple pleasures that cause no harm to themselves or others, carefully avoiding activities or even thoughts that might lead to pain or disturbance.
What they did to reach the state of simple happiness is something we all can do:
- ask whether our fundamental need for subsistence is met by the appropriate satisfiers, i.e., whether we are overfed, overclad or overhoused
- readjust the satisfiers to the need: Eat and drink simple food and beverages, wear simple clothes and live in houses that are not bigger and costlier than necessary.
The result will be an immediate and substantial decline of our stress level and at the same time an upsurge in our sense of control, stress-freedom and self-respect. In other words, an instant increase of our happiness.
Today scientific research endorses the tenets and the lifestyle of the ancient Epicurean happiness experts, and they can be safely copied for making individuals truly happy and saving our natural resources at the same time.
You can make a first step today on this ancient and proven pathway from pain to pleasure by aligning your need for subsistence with tried and true happiness-boosting satisfiers, like opting for appropriate housing, clothing and food. If you need support or additional resources for the next steps, just browse the Internet for the happiness-boosting Epicurean pathway from pain to pleasure, from stress to stress-freedom.
stress prevention through appropriate preparation
There are hundreds of thousands of tips, suggestions, courses and books on stress-management on the internet but only a very few remind us of a proven method of stress-prevention used for at least 2300 years: appropriate preparation.
Facilitating workshops on negotiation techniques I have seen hundreds of time how nervous and stressed were those who did not prepare thoroughly. As a student I was very calm if I was prepared for an exam – which in fact was seldom the case.
Life’s top ten “stressors”
- Death of spouse
- Divorce
- Marital separation; marital reconciliation
- Death of close family member
- Changing residences
- Personal injury or illness
- Marriage
- Loss of job
- Change in financial state
- Prison
need not stress us at all if we are adequately prepared .
Who can prepare us for these events? Our schools do not do this at all, our families very seldom. Two philosophical schools, both about 2300 years old, were created just for furnishing the appropriate tools with which they prepared their adepts to face life’s top and bottom “stressors” and yet stay stress-free.
I mean the Stoics and the Epicureans. Their goals and followers were rather different but the tools and methods they used were rather similar – and most of them are just as valid today as they were 2300 years ago.
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