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The true Epicurean cultivates the capacity to take pleasure in simple things, while those around him chase pleasure in more things.
‘To change your life,’ she said, ‘you must first of all change the nature of your desires.’
At the point of death, Epicurus believed, we simply dissolve into the basic constituents of the universe: atoms. ‘Death is nothing to us,’ he wrote. ‘For the body, when it has been resolved into its elements, has no feeling, and that which has no feelings is nothing to us.’
Excessive pleasure, for Diogenes, as for all Epicureans of the original school, was no kind of pleasure at all. It was sickness.
An unnecessary desire was easily identified, in this scheme, because a failure to gratify it caused no pain.
If pursuit of a particular pleasure would likely end in tears, Epicurus taught his followers, then it should be simply passed over.
‘And often we consider pains superior to pleasures when submission to the pains for a long time brings us as a consequence greater pleasure.’
‘Pleasant it is, when on the great sea the winds trouble the waters, to gaze from shore upon another’s great tribulation: not because any man’s troubles are a delectable joy, but because to perceive what ills you are free from yourself is pleasant.’
SCHADENFREUDE, MAKING ME FEEL GLAD THAT I'M NOT U
