The Ancient Greek Philosophy of Pooping In Public -1 star

How far are you willing to go to be truly happy?

Travels With Epicurus: A Journey to a Greek Island in Search of a Fulfilled Life by Daniel Klein 1.2 stars.

The ancient Greek philosopher Diogenes liked to urinate on people who offended him.* He slept in an old clay wine jar, shat in his seat at the theatre, and when told to stop masturbating in marketplaces, replied, “I only wish it were as easy to banish hunger by rubbing my belly.”

*A lesser man than I would have said, ‘Diogenes liked to urinate on people who pissed him off’, but I am better than that.

True, the philosopher Daniel Klein wrote about was Epicurus, not Diogenes, but Epicurus wasn’t nearly as interesting. Epicurus didn’t masturbate in public to prove society’s rules were meaningless, he just tried to be happy without getting arrested on indecency charges. He believed in dedicating your life to the pursuit of pleasure, but felt that the best way to do that was by living simply. After all, eating healthy food makes you feel better than binging on junk, though to be fair, Epicurus lived before the invention of the peanut butter cup.

Which is why it’s funny that Travels With Epicurus is about Klein’s month long journey to Greece to explore Epicurus’ ideas about happiness. A true follower of Epicurus would have sought his happiness simply at home. Honestly, I’m pretty sure Klein just wanted to go to Greece for a month. Travels With Epicurus is a rotten book, but a great tax write off.

It should be easy to follow the real lesson of both Diogenes and Epicurus, which is to pay enough attention to your life so that you can see what makes you happy but strangely, faith often gets in the way. Almost everyone carries within them an overwhelming faith in an idea. Some people believe they’ll be happy if they can find someone to marry. Other people believe they’ll be happy if they get to the ‘right’ body size or make a certain amount of money. I knew, with the sort of faith that moves mountains, that once I’d achieved enough recognition, I’d be happy. That faith, the certainty that happiness would come ‘if only’ made it impossible for me to pay attention to what actually did and didn’t bring me joy. I didn’t know if I was the sort of person who liked sleeping in an empty barrels and crapping in theaters. Instead, I woke up every day with blind faith that my happiness depended on a certain kind of success and so I spent every day living blindly, crashing through my life unable to see how to best live.

Happiness, at least for me, depended on letting go of what I was sure was true for long enough, so that I could see what actually worked for me and then keeping doing it. But who knows, it may be different for you. If it is, fine, just don’t sit next to me at the movies.