For Living the Good Life Stress-Free: Orientation
We all need orientation 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 existence 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. Anyway they are churning out ever “new” happiness recipes, as if re-inventing the wheel every week.
I will endeavour to make the practical Epicurean happiness guidance 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 might 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.
Epicurean solutions for our burning problems – Prof. Hossenfelder’s views (3): how science can produce more happiness
Malte Hossenfelder sees Epicurus’s topicality also in the Epicurean approach to science. For Epicurus science was a tool to achieve happiness directly through stress-FREEDOM: the role of science was to liberate the stressFREEDOM seekers from irrational fears and at the same time to furnish knowledge directly relevant to live a happy life.
We use science to subdue and overexploit nature, to produce unnecessary products and awake a sense of greed for these products in the belief that all this process will lead us finally indirectly to happiness.
Taking the direct way would be more efficient for us and more sustainable for nature’s resources. The Epicurean approach results in a faith in nature’s laws that work independently of our wishes and desires and therefore we needn’t care or worry about them, even if some of our theories prove to be false. “How could be a man disturbed by a failure, if he’s free from ambition and fears neither death nor pains?” states Hossenfelder.
Hossenfelder doesn’t say this but any Epicurean (and many others) would agree to it: science should primarily do the following:
- develop ways for producing more food with less effort
- develop more efficient medicines with less side effects
- develop better housing solutions for more people
and communicate its accomplishments in such a way that food-, health- and housing-specialists can apply the findings.
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
stress-FREEDOM for our planet through green hair
Minorities which were suppressed, persecuted or just discriminated against are getting more and more visibility in the media and more acceptance in society in general.
2,500 red haired people attended the Redhead Day in Breda, the Netherlands, on Sept. 7, 2008 The festival gathers natural redheads and their “non-redhaired partners, children and admirers” every year:.http://www.roodharigen.nl/ . The American http://realmofredheads.com/ counts almost 3000 members.
I wonder when will the stress-FREEDOM adepts be willing to come out of their Epicurean closets. After 800 years of flourishing (roughly from 300 BCE till 500 CE) they were forced to go underground, their clear ideas were partly stolen, distorted and ridiculed, and congruent practice of simple life forgotten.
In the last 30 years there is a rising consciousness of sustainability issues and people might just discover that Epicurean simplicity might be the medicine for lots of physical and mental diseases caused by stress. Communication specialists will have to deliver the message backed by scientific research so that more and more people can realize that Epicurean simplicity can guarantee not only happiness for its practitioners but also sustainability for the globe.
Being a friend of wisdom – a practicing philosopher and active supporter of global sustainability – might just become presentable and even acceptable so that the seekers of stress-FREEDOM for themselves and for our planet can come out and come together!
As a starter, we might paint our hair green and organize a festival every year!
stress-FREE cuisine: cat-food system adapted for humans?
Adapting the cat-food system for humans might make the preparation of daily 3-5 meals really stress-FREE and sustainable – was my first thought while reading the last issue of the German TEST magazine’s cat-food test results. The German language link:
http://www.test.de/themen/haus-garten/test/-Katzenfutter/1708060/1708060/1709973/
Everybody would know how many calories they need of which nutrients (carbohydrates, fats, fiber, minerals, proteins, vitamins, and water) and we could buy our breakfast, lunch, dinner, snack and dessert cans for weeks ahead. Cooking would not be a burden any more: you could do it only when you really felt like. (Well it could not be an excuse, either…)
homo naturaliter epicureus
Tertullian (CE 160-225), the prolific early Christian author opined that the human soul is basically Christian: “anima naturaliter christiana”. The Catholic PR has generalized this belief further, maintaining that the whole human being is basically Christian, not only his /her soul: “homo naturaliter christianus”. They mean that everybody is a natural born Christian but later, influenced by her/his environment and/or her/his own sins they sort of turn away from the their natural religion.
Observation of human behavior and some knowledge of Epicureanism have convinced me, however, that the natural religion/attitude of – at least of a significant part of – human beings is rather Epicurean than Christian:
- most people want to stay alive and enjoy their lives;
- prefer pleasure over pain;
- do not really believe in an afterlife (at least when they care to give this problem at least 5 minutes of thought),
- realize that most of our infinite desirers are artificially generated by PR/publicity and that our real needs are much simpler and easier to satisfy (at least when they care to give this problem at least 5 days of study and reflection)
“It is not surprising that Epicureanism should have some modern appeal as a faith, and that some people are attempting to revive it. It has the charm of antiquity to recommend it, and the fact that it was for seven centuries a living faith; unlike most extinct religions, we have a clear idea of what the tenets of Epicureanism were; and its religious and ethical doctrines are compatible with the naturalism of modern science, while their scientific doctrines prefigured it. ”
(see more about this in SkepticWiki)
Thomas Jefferson, one of the founders of modern America, was too an Epicurean as he described in one of his letters. He, like Epicurus, treated slaves as equals and advocated natural human rights.
It is difficult to say, what proportion of humankind tends to cultivate freedom, friendship, reflection, honesty and tolerance instead of power, status, bigotry and manipulation. The socio-cultural environment we grow up in has certainly a major, perhaps determinant influence on our beliefs and behavior patterns. I read somewhere that some American Indian tribes burnt all the belongings of a tribe member who died, so that her/his relatives, friends and acquaintances should have no ground to develop greedy thoughts. I think socio-cultural anthropology (especially the ethnography of some of the American Indian, African. Eastern Polynesian cultures) could furnish us a long list of tried and true socio-cultural mechanisms to counter -balance our also natural tendencies to dominate, fight, hate, be greedy, jealous, envious. That is if we really cared to change our socio-cultural environment.
Another promising resource for the development of a sustainable socio-cultural evironment that fosters happiness could be Manfred Max-Neef’s “Human Scale Development”:
FREE Report about stress
Download instantly your copy!