Category
Happiness & well-being
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Wu wei for burnt-out founders: what did Laozi actually mean?
After Stoicism, I've been reading the Daodejing. One idea that hits hard is wu wei, usually translated "non-action" or "effortless action". Chapter 48 says that in pursuing learning you add something every day, but in pursuing the Dao you let something go…
Started by Rohan Desai1 reply81 views -
The hedonic treadmill shows money can’t buy lasting happiness
Psychologists Brickman and Campbell coined the phrase "hedonic treadmill" in 1971: we adapt to improvements in our circumstances and return to a baseline level of happiness. A famous 1978 study by Brickman, Coates and Janoff-Bulman suggested lottery winners weren't much happier than…
Started by Rohan Desai5 replies201 views -
What exactly is Aristotle’s “function argument” in Nicomachean Ethics I.7?
I teach this every year and I always feel I fumble it. My summary for students goes roughly like this: the good of anything that has a function lies in performing that function well human beings have a function it isn't nutrition…
Started by Giulia Ferrante5 replies143 views -
I would plug into the experience machine, and most refusals are just status quo bias
Robert Nozick's thought experiment in Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974): a machine can give you any experiences you like, indistinguishable from reality. You'd believe you were writing a great novel or climbing a mountain, but you'd be floating in a tank. Would…
Started by Huang Wei-ting5 replies220 views -
Epictetus says some things are up to us. What did that depend on for him?
I drive a city bus in Ankara and I listen to lectures between stops. Epictetus is my favourite. The Handbook begins by saying some things are up to us and some are not: our opinions, desires and aversions are up to us;…
Started by Serkan Aydoğdu5 replies176 views -
Night shifts and Epictetus: the dichotomy of control on a hospital ward
The Enchiridion opens by dividing things into those up to us (our judgments, impulses, desires and aversions) and those not up to us (our bodies, property, reputation, office). Epictetus says that suffering comes from treating the second kind as though it were…
Started by Elin Lindqvist4 replies142 views -
Natural, necessary and empty desires: running a small winery by Epicurus’s sorting
I make small-batch wine in the Adelaide Hills. The irony of an Epicurean in the wine trade isn't lost on me, but I've found his sorting of desires the most useful bit of ancient philosophy I've ever read. In the Letter to…
Started by Bec Doyle4 replies148 views -
Do capabilities measure a good life better than happiness surveys do?
I advise NGOs on making public buildings accessible. The donors I work with want outcomes, and increasingly the outcome they ask for is "satisfaction": did people report being happier after the ramp was built? I find this maddening, and Amartya Sen's work…
Started by Dima Nasser5 replies148 views -
Epicureans and Cārvākas: two ancient materialisms, two ideas of pleasure?
I teach physics in Mangaluru and have spent years arguing that the Cārvāka or Lokāyata materialists deserved a fairer hearing than their opponents gave them. Reading Epicurus, I keep seeing the comparison, and I want to test it. Both schools hold that…
Started by Arvind Poojary4 replies230 views -
We were taught “control what you can control” in the army. Was that Stoicism?
I served twenty-two years in the Korean army. In my last years "resilience training" was introduced, and the instructors sometimes quoted Epictetus. Control what you can control. Let the rest go. Some officers had read about James Stockdale, the American pilot who…
Started by Choi Byeong-hun5 replies224 views -
Preferred indifferents: a real distinction, or having your health and despising it too?
I'm a nurse in palliative care and my own sympathies are Epicurean, so I come to this a little sceptical. The Stoics say virtue is the only good. Health, wealth, reputation, even life itself, are "indifferent": neither good nor bad. But then,…
Started by Nadia Haddad4 replies138 views -
If the Stoic technique works without the Stoic cosmos, the cosmos was never doing the work
I burnt out last year running a startup, and Stoicism helped me back. I read Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius and practised separating what's in my control from what isn't. I don't believe in a rationally ordered cosmos governed by providence. The practice…
Started by Rohan Desai7 replies312 views -
What are the three kinds of theory of well-being that Parfit distinguished?
I ran a startup in Mumbai for six years and burnt out last year. For most of that time I thought I was optimising for happiness, mine and the team's. Now I'm not sure what I was optimising for. A friend pointed…
Started by Rohan Desai4 replies192 views -
Reading group: Miskawayh, The Refinement of Character, on happiness
I keep a secondhand bookshop off Mutanabbi Street, and the book I most often press on young customers who say they want philosophy is Miskawayh's Tahdhīb al-akhlāq, The Refinement of Character. Miskawayh (c. 932–1030) worked as a librarian and treasurer in the…
Started by Zainab Kadhim5 replies232 views -
The Buddhist answer to ‘what makes a life go well’ refuses the shape of the question
Most theories of well-being name a good to pursue: pleasure, the satisfaction of desire, a list of objective goods, the development of human excellence, a life of virtuous activity. Even asceticism names one, freedom from appetite. The teaching I have followed for…
Started by Ayya Kusalañāṇī5 replies184 views