This one feels the most relevant to our lives right now.
Alexander conquered the Greek city-states and built an empire like none before. After his death, the empire fractured into four kingdoms, all eventually swallowed by Rome.
These Hellenistic empires were larger and more centralized than the old city-states. Ordinary people found themselves increasingly powerless in politics.
This reality shaped thought itself: People started avoiding social questions altogether. What’s the point of all that thinking when you can’t change anything anyway?
So philosophers turned their attention mainly to individual questions:
How can an individual achieve happiness?
Epicurus: Refined Hedonism
Epicurus’s advice: Enjoy life thoughtfully.
There’s only one true good—pleasure.
Pleasure means maximum health and comfort, minimum pain and suffering.
So how do you get there? Calculate carefully.
Resist immediate, fleeting pleasures. Go after the refined, lasting ones.
And don’t indulge yourself. Indulgence really means handing the controls of your happiness to someone else. Look at addictions like gambling or drugs—high when you’ve got them, miserable when you don’t. Total net loss.
Epicurus urged us to savor the small, manageable pleasures we can actually control.
He also opposed getting involved in politics—too little pleasure, too much headache.
If you’re politically apathetic, you can find your people in Epicurus.
But I don’t buy Epicureanism, mainly because pain and pleasure are too tangled for ordinary reason to calculate. Yesterday’s pleasure might taste completely different today. Sometimes great pleasure demands you suffer a bit first. And honestly, look at life as a whole—suffering surely outweighs joy. Does that mean you should just say fuck it and quit living?
I don’t think happiness can be chased or calculated. Happiness seems like a side effect of chasing other things. So personally, I’m more drawn to the Stoics.
The Stoics
The Stoics said: be independent of external factors.
To be happy, be as unaffected by externals as possible. Live within the controllable self.
Happiness doesn’t depend on anything outside you. Death, disease, pain, poverty—none of it matters for happiness.
The only real happiness is living with a clear conscience.
But how does a person stay unmoved and calm facing whatever fate throws at them?
Through reason. Understand that everything follows patterns. You can’t control it all.
So accept whatever comes cheerfully. Build a strong inner core.
But none of these answers really work.
Epicurus’s theory is for rich people. Only those who’ve already filled their bellies have the luxury to think about how to maximize pleasure. People clawing just to survive have no bandwidth for “controllable pleasures.”
And even the hardest-core Stoic can’t always feel happy when taking serious hits.
How does a simple “stay calm” cover the agony of separation, death, illness, devastating loss?
Without some theory of higher purpose to convince yourself with, how can anyone face life’s chaos with peace?
So in a universal sense—poor or rich, strong or weak—how do you find happiness?
The answer is staring us in the face: supernatural power. Religion.
Next time we’ll dive into medieval theological philosophy.