Happy: Why More or Less Everything is Absolutely Fine

Lucretius says that the eternal non-existence of death is something we’ve already been through. It happened before we were born. We’ve been in the eternal abyss once before, and we don’t feel any regret about it. So why fear returning? This is known as the symmetry argument. What ‘happens to us’ after death symmetrically reflects what ‘happened to

At all levels, the drive to achieve the brightest kind of success is seen as the most natural and robust path to take in life.

in the meantime these symbols have become forms of idolatry, mistaken by the religious for the destination, when they were only intended as signposts. ‘God’ becomes reduced to something with motivations we can have described to us by a pastor every Sunday, to this or that deity who revealed himself here or there. The deep experience of transcendenc

9 Anger and Hurt

In CBT, we find the Stoic insistence that it is our judgements that cause us problems, as opposed to events themselves; the instigation of more appropriate alternative judgements; and the instruction to systematically review one’s work. Both have us question what is in our control and what is not, and remind us, when we are at the mercy of our over

There are some other important differences between the Stoics and the Epicureans. Firstly, as I’ve said, the Stoics did not shut themselves away; they were very active, often wealthy citizens, noblemen and leaders, interested (unlike the inhabitants of the Garden) in creating a just and virtuous society. They

One important new idea that emerged from Marx for our purposes is as follows: we saw work as an activity that was supposed to endow us with happiness and a sense of humanity. This was a strange new concept, and although it sprang up as a reaction against capitalism, there is no doubt that it is now part of the capitalist creed. How many of us talk

Meanwhile, back in ancient Greece, Eros, the god of love was hard at work. Socrates recommended that to live happily, we should elevate our relationship with this fickle deity. First, we should rise above an attraction to beauty in a particular person and allow ourselves to be drawn to a more general picture of beauty and finally to the Idea of bea

Irvine’s thought exercise shows that our desires would diminish drastically if we didn’t need to impress anyone. Our requirements would probably become limited to what we might think of as ‘natural’ or essential desires: food, water, shelter and so on. This does not sound like a particularly pleasant existence or a lifestyle we would choose, but we