Summary of Philosophy: A Guide to Happiness, Epicurus on Happiness (Part 1)
A few weeks ago, I started a six-part blog series to summarize a fascinating film titled Philosophy: A Guide to Happiness. Part one was about Socrates’ thoughts on self-confidence. Part two focuses on Epicurus and what he believed humans can do to find happiness.
Epicurus spent his life chasing happiness and was led to conclude that it’s a rather tricky issue. He thought that pleasure was the most important thing in life and that one has no reason to feel guilty for chasing pleasure. He was, however, known for getting by on very little often making meals out of water, bread, and a few olives.
His central philosophy was that humans are not very good at understanding what makes us happy and that we can easily and mistakenly conclude that material things are what will make us happy. It’s the “what we want is not what we need” philosophy: we pursue our manic impulses not really understanding what it is that makes us happy.
Epicurus believed he discovered the formula for what we really do need in order to be happy. He believed happiness requires three things:
1. Friends
When Epicurus moved to Athens, he bought a large house in the middle of town and asked a group of friends to move in with him. He did this because he viewed friendship as being something we should seek to have around at all times, not just for the occasional phone call or whatever. He suggested making an effort to never eat alone. “A feeding without a friend is the life of a lion or a wolf,” he said. He determined it more important who you eat with than what you eat.
2. Freedom
Later in life, Epicurus and his friends left Athens and started a commune in a remote part of Greece. “We must free ourselves from the prison of everyday life and politics,” he said. He thought it was better to have a simple life in which one is free than a life in which we are answerable to insufferable bosses, etc. He and his friends at the commune became self-sufficient and gained independence from what other people thought. They no longer felt that they had something to prove to others financially.
3. An Analyzed Life
Epicurus thought it was important to slow down and analyze our worries and troubles. He thought that the key to eliminating our anxieties was to give ourselves time to think them through. In order to do this, we need time and space to allow for quiet contemplation about our lives.
His philosophy was that if one does not have much money but does have these three things, then they will not be denied happiness. Conversely, someone with money who is lacking friends, freedom, and space for an analyzed life will never be happy. You hear this backed up in psychological studies that show money does not significantly contribute to one’s happiness once their basic needs are met.
Epicurus was a strong critic of advertising. He blamed it for clouding our view of the path to happiness. He suggested that the reason advertising works is because it succeeds in convincing us on a subconscious level that the product being sold will provide us with one or more of the three things that we need to be happy.
So an ad like the one above might succeed in selling us Bacardi when it’s really friends and freedom that we’re looking for.
Interestingly, all of the books that Epicurus wrote were eventually lost. His wisdom survived by being passed down as a creed through societies that formed based on his suggestions for living. A wealthy man, Diogenes of Oenoanda, paid to have a summary of Epicurean philosophy carved on the walls of an ancient city in what is now in modern southwest Turkey. Diogenes believed that we needed constant reminders of what makes us happy and that simply studying philosophy once in a while wasn’t enough. Think of it as balancing out the forces of advertising which seek to cloud our true desires. Diogenes’ wall was an advertisement for what we really do need.
The film shows a modern day effort to replicate that type of counter advertising. Unfortunately, as they point out, philosophers aren’t known for having the kind of budget to make major advertising purchases. But one sign they put up in a mall was pretty clever. It depicted a large mansion with a luxury car parked out front. The photo contains an asterisk at the top with a small warning in the corner that says, “Happiness Not Included”. I wonder what effect advertising of this nature might have on a grander scale? If people can be convinced that they need material things, can they be successfully reminded that they in fact do not need them through the same medium?
My Skydiving Footage
Before I was ever serious about poker, I was a pretty avid skydiver. In the summer of 2004, I made my first jump and was immediately hooked. I spent that fall grinding online poker games to have enough money to travel to Florida over winter break where I could go through an Advanced Freefall (AFF) certification course to be a licensed skydiver. In the two years that followed, I traveled around to a fair amount of various skydiving “boogies” as they call them (basically just means “gathering”) and completed a total of 151 jumps before I started prioritizing other things.
A few months ago, I finally got around to having a VHS tape with a bunch of footage of jumps I did converted to DVD. Last night, I spent a few hours editing the footage into a YouTube-ready presentation. It worked out perfectly because when I selected all of the footage I wanted to include it amounted to exactly 10 minutes on the dot, the maximum length for a YouTube video.
It’s worth keeping in mind that while 151 jumps might seem like a lot, it’s basically nothing in the world of skydiving. So this is all pretty much n00b donk amateur footage and nothing nearly as cool as stuff like this being performed by guys who have made literally thousands of skydives over the course of several years. I included some commentary below the video. Most of the footage was shot in the air over Goshen, Indiana unless otherwise specified.
0:00 – Exiting a balloon at Rantoul, Illinois from my perspective. It’s a surreal experience since normally you’re exiting to a ton of noise. Leaving a balloon is all quiet until you pick up velocity.
0:19 – A tricky thing about jumping from a balloon is that you’re exiting wherever the wind happens to have blown you rather than safely over the airport. It creates an added challenge and element of danger. Here I’m setting up for a landing in an elementary school playground and it wasn’t the smoothest landing.
0:56 – My 100th jump. Out of a big Russian helicopter in the air over Rantoul, Illinois. Had to oblige the group in front of me’s request to snap a photo of them before they exited. My friend Scott is on video and gets a nice shot of the helicopter when he deploys.
1:40 – What they call a “hop-n-pop” where you exit at low altitude and deploy rather soon after. I did some backflips on the exit.
2:08 – If you look carefully you can see I had line twists on that deployment. That technically falls into the category of a skydiving malfunction but it is generally very benign and happens every so often. You just have to twist your way out of it.
2:50 – A three-way exit that I cut off pretty quickly since the guy on video was pretty heavy and sunk like a stone rendering him unable to keep us in the frame for the rest of the jump.
3:19 – I don’t know what this was. I guess a buddy and I decided to have a little fun on the ride up and make a video pretending it was my first jump. Clearly, I’m not a very good actor. I exited in the classic n00b fetal position, a big no-no for proper skydiving form.
3:55 – This was what is known as a “tracking jump”. When you put your arms down to your side rather than holding them out in front of you, the change in weight distribution propels you horizontally across the sky. It’s as close to flying as a human can get without wearing a wingsuit.
4:27 – Two-way exit again cut off because of heavy cameraman. Seated in the pink shirt is my friend’s girlfriend who rode up to altitude with us to watch us exit. That experience alone is pretty hairy since most people have never ridden in a plane so small let alone be seated 3 inches away from an open door at 10,000 feet.
5:03 – This was a pretty good jump with me on camera filming the heavy dude. He hesitated on exit but managed to fall fast enough to catch up with me for a dock before we had to break off and deploy.
6:30: – This is me on video filming a tandem jump. What you see at the beginning of the jump was the closest I came to any type of serious catastrophe in skydiving.
7:25 – Tandems deploy very high for safety reasons so the videographer can usually take a long enough delay to keep their deployment in the frame before having to deploy himself. I was pretty proud of the effort for it being the first (and only) time I videoed a tandem; staying with them and keeping everything in frame like that is pretty challenging when you have as little experience as I did. The girl doing the tandem opted not to pay to have it videoed so I was videoing it sans-pressure to just practice. After the dropzone owner saw the footage he was mad at me for giving it to her for free since he said it was high-quality enough that they could have charged her for it.
7:30 – So this is a slo-mo replay of the exit on the tandem jump. What you’ll notice happens is that the tandem’s “drogue”, which is designed to slow down the heavy package to a more sane rate of freefall, hits me on deployment. It was an “oh shit” moment at the time that ended up being no big deal. I just made a bad exit since I wasn’t experienced or prepared enough to know how to properly exit a Cessna with a tandem and ended up in a really bad location for the drogue deployment: right above them. Fortunately, I didn’t get tangled in the line or panic and collide with them (which can happen when you’re right above someone due to the dead air their freefall creates above them). Having a guy with only 100-some jumps video a tandem was a pretty “wild west” move that a bigger dropzone would never in a million years allow. But we had fun in Goshen since it was a pretty small crew and sometimes little liberties got taken here or there.
8:26 – Two-way jump with my friend Keri. Poor girl was always getting hit on by everyone since she was decently cute and more or less the only female around. Interesting side note is that she was raised Amish but decided jumping out of planes was a little more fun than practicing the Amish lifestyle.
9:30 – Keri hits a perfect landing on the gravel pit. I opt for my own shadow instead.
Movie Grades 4Q 2011
I saw a pitiful number of movies last quarter. That was mostly due to moving to Mexico where the theaters, which are actually nicer than you might think, usually don’t offer a particularly thrilling lineup. Not having Netflix was killer, too.
A
Philosophy: A Guide to Happiness – I started a blog series breaking down each of the six parts of this film that give lessons from long-ago deceased philosophers on how to live a life of happiness. It was highly enjoyable and I’d encourage anyone to watch it.
A-
Contagion – I really liked this. Basically about the response to a virus wreaking havoc on humanity. Great cast and script.
Resurrecting the Champ – Samuel L. Jackson plays a homeless former boxer that becomes the focus of an up-and-coming journalist’s career piece. I was surprised at how good this was.
Neds – Great Scottish film about Non-Educated Delinquents. Neds exposes the failings of certain social systems like education and family life through the story of one young delinquent. You may want to try this one with the subtitles on though, the English being spoken in the movie was at times inaudible.
End of America – Pretty awesome film pointing out some of the ways the Bush administration paralleled the tactics used by totalitarian governments to undermine the freedom of society. You can watch it here.
The Crash of 1929 – Documentary film about U.S. society leading up to the stock market crash of 1929 and the various factors that caused the crash. Really fascinating. Made me feel bad for the people back then because they were all just such total suckers without a clue. Makes me wonder what will cause people to say that about us in another 80 years. A lot, I’m sure.
B+
Dream House – A poor man’s Shutter Island and I love me some Shutter Island.
Jack and Jill – About as dumb as a movie gets, but it had me laughing quite a bit.
C
War of the Worlds (2005) – Just seemed so one-dimensional. Tom Cruise running from aliens for 120 minutes. That was the whole film.
D+
Killer Elite – Ugh this was just dreadful. I can almost hear the production meetings “let’s get De Niro, Clive, and Stratham and just blow a lot of shit up, it’s like guaranteed $40 mil box office right?” “Yea Jim, sounds great, let’s run with this one!”
D-
Shark Night – I feel dirty having participated in the consumer experience of buying a ticket to see this.
Some Habits I Would Like to Cultivate
While it’s a little arbitrary, I think the spirit of New Year’s which gives people a chance to reflect and make changes in their life makes it a great celebration. I was reading some thoughts Leo Babauta shared on habits today and was feeling inspired. He suggests trying to form just one positive habit per month. So if you can write down 12 habits you would like to form, that will give you one thing to focus on and work towards each month. I think it’s a nice concept in general: every month choosing a habit to cultivate in your life and making part of your daily routine about instilling that habit. Here are some habits I’d like to cultivate in my life:
- Drink more water. I’m generally okay about this, but I go for the bottle of fuzzy soda more than I wish I did. I actually went about 5 years without drinking soda once in my life. Then something happened to where I just went back to consuming it like crazy as is typical of many Americans. I’d like to start paying attention to when I feel an urge to reach for a soda and choose water instead.
- Waste less time online. I waste an unbelievable amount of time on the Internet. I find it absolutely fascinating. All of the tantalizing information and entertainment sucks me in like a bug to a light. In any given session at my computer online, there reaches a point where it’s no longer really a positive in my life to still be sitting there. The habit I would like to instill is to notice this and get off the computer immediately rather than click around idly for minutes or hours longer. It’s quite honestly depressing to think about how much time I’ve wasted online in the past several years.
- Read more books. This will be an easier habit to instill thanks to the Kindle my parents got me for Christmas. I’m really loving that thing. What a great little gadget. It satisfies my neurotic need to always be playing with something electronic. I read Slaughterhouse-Five on it in three days. There’s no reason I can’t manage to read an average of an hour a day. I can find that time easily just by cutting out the idle Internet browsing.
- Exercise daily. I was in a great exercise routine before I went back to the U.S. for Christmas. Then, two weeks of traveling and a vacationer’s mindset made me fall off the wagon. Classic tale, really. To me, daily physical exercise is perhaps the most important thing you can be doing for your life. I’m not going to bother with all sorts of firm goals like, “I need to bench x pounds by x date!” That type of an approach seems to arbitrarily pigeon-hole me into an exercise regimen I’ll likely quickly grow tired of. It’s not like I’m trying to train for something in particular that requires a highly specialized workout routine. I just want to exercise each day. So the main priority is finding an exercise that I think to be fun. So maybe squats and deadlifts in the gym one day, yoga the next, whatever. It doesn’t matter as long as it’s something, so I’ll just play it by ear and go with what sounds good on any given day.
- Grind the small details. I can really suck at life when it comes to taking care of menial, tedious tasks. Things like running errands, cleaning, or working on a personal budget just madden me because I get bored with maintenance tasks. Unfortunately, if you neglect these little daily maintenance tidbits, your world can fall out of orbit. I want to do a better job of taking an extra moment to get the details right. For example, take an extra moment to see which bottle of water is the best value rather than grabbing the first one I see (I don’t generally care what brand I’m drinking). Or spending a few minutes in the evening to make a list of things I know I’ll be glad if I remember to do the next day. These boring little details might not be glamorous, but they add up and can lead to increased happiness, I think.
- Be more engaging with others. Going along with the theme of wanting to slow down and not rush through things, I want to do a better job of investing in personal interactions with others. Sometimes I tend to just gloss over this. Like why should I have to bother with having to think of something nice to say to the person behind the coffee counter? But that “just give me my damned latte” attitude is so unfortunate. It’s no way to go through life. I’d like to get better at taking an extra moment to be pleasant with others.
- Less caffeine. I’ve been trying to be really aware lately of how I feel when I consume caffeine. I think I generally don’t particularly care for it. The short-term boost of energy (not to mention the soothing ritual that securing a cup of coffee provides) can be luring, but I ultimately find the drug to be a net negative in my life. Maybe a nice compromise to get the soothing ritual while cutting down on the caffeine consumption would be to drink tea instead. I love tea. A warm cup of tea with a little honey stirred in might just be the greatest thing about being alive. Yea, that’s what I’ll do: less coffee, more tea.
- Be a better dog owner. I have to admit, having a dog can sometimes be a big pain. Maybe you’re tired and ready for bed and the dog is standing by the door like he wants to go out for a walk to pee and all you want to do is just flip his switch to “off” so you don’t have to deal with it. I would actually encourage people to be really thoughtful about these things before they adopt a dog. For many people, as it was with me, my dog was an emotional acquisition. I didn’t really spend much time considering the practical aspects of the dog owner’s lifestyle. It can take a lot of time and energy. Sometimes I get frustrated with my dog for having to spend time dealing with him. But I’ve had him for six years now and he’s a part of the package for better or worse. I might as well figure out how to be more patient with him and budget more of my time to keeping him happy and healthy.
I could probably think of a few more things, but I think that’s a pretty good list for now. What’s on your list?
Happy New Year, everyone.
