Why your Epicurean approach will never make you truly happy | Arthur Brooks

A huge mistake that people often make is thinking that Mother Nature cares about our happiness. Mother Nature wants us to survive and pass on our genes. To get calories and mates and to stay safe. Not only does Mother Nature not care about our happiness, Mother Nature knows that we need to be unhappy, that we need to have lots of negative emotions. They alert us to threats in our environment.

We need to feel fear when something is a threat to us. Happiness is our business. That's the true human, even perhaps the divine path of how life actually works. Epicurus was an ancient Greek philosopher who had a very simple idea about how to be happier: He wasn't trying to have pleasure all the time. He wasn't some sort of unbridled hedonist. He just said that if I can eliminate the sources of suffering in my life, I'm gonna be a happier person.

And, you know, it makes a lot of sense, doesn't it? Given the fact that so much of our perceived unhappiness comes from the sources of suffering. If you can figure out a way to avoid the sources of suffering, the relationships that bring friction, the things that you don't like, you'll be a happier person. It's intuitively a pretty obvious way of living your life.

That epicurean idea of avoiding suffering has been incredibly pervasive at different times in history. We're in an epicurean moment. People think of the word "epicurean" and they think, you know, eating nice food and all that. But really what that means is trying to avoid the sources of suffering. And that's what we're trying to do with our kids.

We're trying more and more to keep our kids safe from suffering and conflict. We try to protect students from disagreements in the classroom or ideas they might find objectionable. We're trying to protect anybody and everybody from the suffering that is ordinarily attended upon life. And the reason is because suffering is actually part of life.

And when we avoid the sources of suffering, we're still gonna have just as many negative emotions because that's the way that life works, and we're not gonna get the negative experiences that help us learn and grow. So the result of it is that the more epicurean that we are, the weaker that we grow up.

Carl Jung, the great Swiss psychoanalyst, he talked about the fact that we only know what good is because we see bad. We need contrast in our lives to actually experience the beautiful things in life. And this is paradoxically what we're denying so many people today. By trying to get rid of their sources of suffering, we're getting rid of their sources of bliss.