Hello, and welcome back to Every Dawn, your morning thought on workdays. Today, I want to read you another sentence from the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus. We've talked about him a little in the past. Here is another sentence that is very interesting from his "Principal Doctrines." You can find the book on the internet for free. He writes:
"He who understands the limits of life knows how easy it is to procure enough to remove the pain of want and make the whole of life complete and perfect. Hence, there is no longer any need of things which are not to be won by labor and conflict."
Now, what does this really mean? "He who understands the limits of life knows how easy it is to procure enough to remove the pain of want." You remember, perhaps, when we talked about Epicurus, that he has this idea that things don't give us positive pleasures, but instead, we only have pain which comes from the absence of some normal state. So, instead of saying, "I will feel good if I eat chocolate," Epicurus would say, "No, this is not a good, this is not a correct description. You will feel good if you eat anything that will make the pain of hunger go away." And after you've swallowed the thing and the pain of hunger is away, it doesn't matter anymore what you ate. All these ways to fill your belly are totally equivalent.
And this is what he means here: how easy it is to procure enough to get enough to remove the pain of want—the pain of not having, the pain of being hungry, thirsty, not having a place to sleep in, not having a roof over your head. But these are easy to solve, and then the whole of your life will be, as he says, complete and perfect. And then, you don't need any things that can only be obtained through labor and conflict.
And with this, he means our world of work, which is well described by saying, you know, labor and conflict. We labor every day. And labor has a particular meaning. It means work that is largely meaningless, that is not something we do because we want it or because it enriches us, but we have to do it in order to survive. Then, it's labor, and conflict: every professional job comes with conflict because I'm always fighting against the others who want to have my position, who want to advance ahead of me, who want to become the boss. And I'm always in conflict with all those other people who either want to have my position or they want to have the position I want to have. And we are always fighting against each other, and this is unfortunately the case in many companies and especially in universities. It's very obvious where there's a limited amount of secure places, and there are far too many young people who are competing for them. And so, it's a constant conflict: who will get the next professorship, who will get the next tenure, who will get the next assistant professorship, and so on.
But this is not only universities; it's everywhere, right? But if we knew the limits of life, if we knew that our happiness cannot actually grow beyond the state of being full, of not being thirsty, of having a roof over your head, and then all the other pleasures are natural. Of course, we need friends, yes, but friends are free. And we need to see a nice sunset, but this is free. We need to listen to nice music; this is free. I can sing myself. We need to eat or drink something nice, but many nice things to eat and drink are free. I can, you know, or they are cheap. I can plant mint on my balcony, and then I have free mint infusion, which is delicious. I can make bread myself; I can bake bread, which is very cheap and would give me nourishment and is also tasty. It is great. I can cook myself all sorts of cheap but very good dishes, very healthy dishes also.
I don't need to go to this expensive restaurant, which would set me back, you know, $200 for a steak or something. For these $200, I can live for a month, you know, in terms of stuff to eat if I buy the cheapest thing that I can on a local market or perhaps in my supermarket. And I will live healthier, I will live more satisfied, I will learn how to use my own skills in order to cook, I will have a much more variety of food—the other person just had one steak for $200.
So where is the point of that, right? And so, very often, we do make these bad choices, Epicurus would say, because we're just used to them, and everybody else does the same. But we should stop. We should stop and think: Is this really what I want? Is this really what will make my life happy? Will this steak make my life better or not? And then, perhaps, we have an opportunity to think about it and to change it.
Thank you for watching this, and see you next time. Bye-bye.
