Epicurus was revolutionary in his time for this simple idea: «Why do you delay your happiness? Make the radical choice of happiness! To do this, he said, we must exercise ourselves in what brings us happiness, which makes us feel good.
Epicurus' message was simple: Enjoy this life and don't worry about what comes after death. Something so simple in appearance was revolutionary and liberating for many people, in their time and beyond. The American president Thomas Jefferson himself, who considered himself an Epicurean, managed to include the search for happiness in the Declaration of Independence of the United States.
The message that the search for happiness is not utopian and is a daily challenge remains just as valid today.
How to do it?
Here is the heart of the matter: Although history tends to portray Epicurus as a man eager for pleasures, the reality is that pleasure, for him, was a sober and thoughtful search. Why?
From the outset, no pleasure is bad, says our philosopher, but beware: if the things that give you pleasure involve greater discomfort than the pleasures themselves, they are not worth it! So "examine your pleasures and see which are necessary and which are not." In other words: weigh the advantages of a pleasure against its disadvantages.
For example, excessive alcoholic beverages are no longer pleasure, they are pain. For the Epicurean, pleasure is above all the absence of pain in body and soul. So, to maximize your happiness, you prefer easy-to-get, trouble-free pleasures.
Wanting to feel pleasure is a natural instinct, but should we run after everything that ignites the pleasure centers of the brain? Epicurus tells us that we must rather develop the knowledge and wisdom of knowing what pleasures are good for us, so as not to fall into dependency or addiction. Thus, he said, "you will not have to fear fortune."
Epicurus suspected that humans are clumsy when choosing happiness and very good at making life bitter. And once again, as is often the case with Greek philosophers, this intuition is rooted in reality. Why? Because the brain programmed to survive in humans does not prioritize your happiness, but your survival, and therefore, it fixes, enlarges and memorizes the negative rather than the positive. And that's a compelling reason why it's hard for us to choose happiness on a daily basis! As the psychiatrist Daniel Siegel says, "the human brain is Teflon for the positive and velcro for the negative."
Therefore, Epicurus tells us: forget the past, do not drag it with you. Why are you going to be unhappy now, simply because you were a while ago? Were your parents bad parents? Couldn't you have something you wanted? Has a friend hurt you? Don't keep suffering for it, go back to the present!