waiting for ‘verdict’ NOT stressful for Epicureans
The surgery went well yesterday. It surely hurt to get four needles stuck into my flesh for the radiological screening but Epicureans are taught and trained to accept some pain in order to avoid more pain in the future.
The friendliness of the people at Dean’s in Stoughton Hospital and the lunch cooked in their own kitchen definitely go to the positive side of the pain/pleasure ratio.
I was sedated with Versed and slept nicely as the surgeon did a wide excision over the same spot they had biopsied a few weeks ago. He also removed a lipoma from my back and 3 lymph nodes from my groin and sent the tissues to the pathologists who will give us the results in few days.
I have got painkillers so I had an additional nap in the afternoon and a good night sleep till 5.30 in the morning when I got up and attended to the running projects.
I know that some?/many? people find the time of waiting for the “verdict” of the pathologists stressful, probably due to the emotional load of their hopes and fears.
For Epicureans there is no reason to be stressed about the results of histological analysis since they are aware of the fact that they will die one day anyway and it does not really matter what kills them, or as Metrodorus put it:
“It is possible to provide security against other things, but as far as death is concerned, we men all live in a city without walls.”
Epicureans try to live their lives stressFREE and to the full as long as they are alive instead of wasting precious time on pointless speculations about its possible length, true to the motto: “vivamus dum vivimus” (‘let’s live as long as we are alive’).
I will live my days the same way whether the pathologists prognosticate a survival chance of 90% or 60% or 30% for the next five years, depending on the number and position of Merkel Cell Carcinoma cells in my body: enjoying my time chatting with my wife, children, friends and relatives, managing the projects of the company I work for (Allegro Translations in Madison, Wisconsin), taking walks in the snow, reading books ( at the time on the unique community experience of the inhabitants of the most remote island in the world, Tristan da Cunha), cooking, enjoying the meals cooked by my wife and daughter, and especially enjoying music, the most fascinating phenomenon for me.
Epicurean solutions for our burning problems – Prof. Hossenfelder’s views (2): needs-based economy for more happiness
Malte Hossenfelder sees Epicurus’s topicality in the first place in the fact that the economy propagated by Epicurus and practiced by his followers for 800 years was a needs-based economy. Practicing it today would eliminate two of the major problems we are facing:
a.The overexploitation of natural resources:
b. The social tensions between rich and poor
to be continued
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