Why your Epicurean approach will never make you truly happy | Arthur Brooks
🌍 **Mother Nature doesn’t care if we’re happy.**
Her only goal? Survival. She wired us to seek food, safety, and reproduction — not happiness.
In fact, 😟 **negative emotions serve a purpose**. Fear, anger, and sadness are evolutionary tools to keep us alert and responsive to threats. Mother Nature *needs* us to be uncomfortable sometimes.
But here's the twist: **Happiness is our responsibility.**
It's a human — maybe even divine — pursuit.
🧘♂️ Enter Epicurus, the ancient Greek philosopher. Contrary to the common image of indulgence, his idea of happiness was simple:
👉 **Eliminate suffering**.
By reducing sources of pain — toxic relationships, stressful habits, unnecessary friction — we can create space for peace. It's not about chasing pleasure, but avoiding harm. And that idea has echoed through history.
Today, we’re living in what some call an **“epicurean age.”**
We overprotect kids from pain, shield students from uncomfortable ideas, and try to bubble-wrap life. But here's the problem...
⚠️ **Avoiding suffering doesn’t eliminate unhappiness.**
It just weakens us. We still experience negative emotions — without the growth that comes from hardship.
🌓 As Carl Jung put it:
> “We only know what good is because we’ve seen bad.”
By avoiding discomfort, we also rob ourselves of contrast — the very thing that gives joy its meaning.
So ironically, in shielding ourselves from pain,
we may be shutting the door on bliss.
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