Philosophy: A Guide to Happiness - Epicurus on Happiness

Documentary inspired and hosted by Alain de Botton, based on his book The Consolations of Philosophy

[ ♫ Gentle Music ♫ ]

Narrator: Ever since ancient times
human beings have looked to

philosophy for the secret of happiness,
but few philosophers have

come up with more suggestive
or more relevant answers than

one born on the Greek island of Samos,
off the coast of modern Turkey,

three hundred and forty one years
before the birth of Christ .

His name was Epicurus.

Very little about him has survived;

all of his books have been lost
across the centuries,

leaving his philosophy of happiness to be
reconstructed from just a few fragments.

Epicurus believed that we could all
find a way to be happy; the problem was,

quite simply, that we were looking
in the wrong place.

[♫♫]

Unlike many philosophers, Epicurus' idea
of happiness actually sounds rather fun,

he didn't think we should feel guilty
about wanting to have a pleasurable,

enjoyable life and promised that he
could show us how to.

Of course you might wonder why you
need a philosopher at all to teach you how

to have a good time.
We seem to think that the key to happiness

is really pretty easy;
its all about having a lot of money,

so we can come to places like this,
and go shopping.

But before we reach for our wallets,
Epicurus wanted us to stop and think;

it's easy to imagine that money
can solve everything, but can it?

[ ♫ Singing in Greek ♫ ]

Epicurus was committed to a life of happiness;
he liked sex, laughter and beauty, but

crucially spent his time pointing out that
happiness is in fact, rather a tricky issue,

and a philosopher might help you to find it
more easily than a credit card ever could.

That Epicurus was in favour of pleasure
at all shocked many of his ancient Greek

contemporaries, his philosophy became
synonymous with a lotus eating lifestyle.

To this day, people who love luxurious
eating and drinking can sometimes be

described as Epicurean, in fact that's
a complete misunderstanding.

[♫ Singing continues ♫ ]

Botton: Epicurus said that pleasure was the
most important thing in life, and yet if

we actually look at the way that he lived,
it seems he lived far from a

luxurious life. His house was very
simple, his clothes were extremely basic,

he always drank water rather than wine,
he found fish much too expensive and

he was happy just eating meals with bread,
vegetables and a few olives.

He once asked a friend, send me a pot
of cheese, so that I can have a feast

whenever I like, these were the kinds
of tastes of a man who would describe

pleasure as the end of life.

Narrator: At the heart of Epicurus' philosophy
is a simple thought: that we aren't very

good at knowing what will make us happy,
that we may feel powerfully drawn towards

material things, and be convinced that
they are what we require to be happy.

We’re often wrong, what we want is not
always what we need, and nothing shows

that up more starkly than our impulse
to go shopping.

Steven: I like shopping, most weeks it’s
just a couple of bags but sometimes it’s,

I don’t know like ten/twelve bags a time,
I like designer names.

Dolce and Gabanna stuff, these clothes,
DKNY and I love Gucci clothes as well.

Narrator : Steven Perry is a hairdresser from
Liverpool who spends all his spare time shopping.

Steven: I suppose I could resist, but usually
I don't, usually I just go in and shop anywhere.

Although when I go out buying all this stuff,
it makes me happy, at the end of the

month when the credit card
and the store card bills and the

loan payments come out, stuff like that,
then that doesn’t make me happy because

I see how much is going out, every month
on debt.

[ Indistinct Talking ]

Botton: How many watches have you got?

Steven: Not really that many, probably
about ten. Something like that.

Botton: You've only got ten watches?
Steven: Only ten

Botton: I've only got one!
What’s the one you’re wearing now?

Steven: A spoon watch at the minute,
I like this just for general everyday

because it’s only like ninety nine
pounds and...

Narrator: Steven often gets into debt and
I couldn't help wondering if his desire

to go shopping might be
a bit out of control.

Botton: So if that’s the everyday watch,
what’s the fancy watch?

Steven: The thousand pound Tag watch
-- Oh my God, that’s amazing, so what’s

the craziest thing you've bought in
terms of like, bad impulse buying?

A pair of shorts.
-- From where?

Umm, from a shopping mall in Liverpool, I'll
show you them, they didn’t have my size,

so I thought these’ll fit me,
but you put them on and they just tend

to look truly horrendous,
like cycling shorts, sorta thing.

Botton: How much did they cost?
-- God, I don’t know, about fifty pounds?

Fifty sixty quid, something like that.
They were never taken back,

the same as these jeans; I
think these have still got the labels on.

I just got these home and they didn't fit
miles too long and miles too big.

I did mean to take them back
but I don’t like taking things back.

Narrator: Do you ever get home and think
I'm surrounded by shopping bags

and you’re thinking God,
what am I going to do with all this?

--Yeah, especially when you come home and
you've just got bags everywhere

and you think, Why have I spent all that?
And the credit card bill comes at the

end of the month and you think,
Oh! Why did I spend all that?

Narrator: In a way we're all a bit
like Steven, people who shop too much;

Epicurus thought he knew why.
We don’t understand what we really

need and so fall prey to manic substitute
desires for huge numbers of ill-fitting

trousers or countless pairs of shoes.
But Epicurus declared that he had

actually discovered what we did need,
and luckily for anyone without

much money, the ingredients of
happiness come pretty cheap.

The first ingredient we need is friends.
Epicurus took the idea of friendship

very seriously, so seriously that
he made an extremely radical innovation.

When he came to Athens in 306 BC
at the age of 35, he bought a large house

just outside the city of Athens, this
place here which he called ‘The Garden’;

of course at that time it was rather
beautiful, more beautiful than it is now,

where it seems to be a taxi graveyard.

What he did, was that he bought this house

and asked a group of friends
to move in with him.

The house was quite large, so there was
room enough for everyone to have

their own quarters at the same time
as coming together for meals and

conversations in the common rooms
of the house.

What Epicurus was doing was picking up
on a rather common sense point,

which is that friends are a
major source of happiness.

But I think where he was distinctive was
in his idea that in order

to really benefit from friends,
you had to see them not just occasionally

not just for the odd drink in a bar
or the odd chat on the phone,

he had to be with his friends at all
times, so they’d be permanent companions.

And I think that was his distinctive
idea of happiness.

Narrator: You wouldn't catch Epicurus
devouring lunch on his own in a burger bar;

he recommended that we try
never even to eat a snack alone.

Before you eat or drink anything, he said,
Consider carefully who you eat or drink with,

rather than what you eat or drink,
for feeding without a friend is the life

of a lion or a wolf.

[ ♫♫ ]

Narrator: The second thing Epicurus thought
we needed to be happy was freedom and

in order to achieve it,
he and his friends decided to

leave Athens altogether.

For them, to be free meant to be financially

independent, economically self-sufficient,
not answerable to horrible bosses

for their income,
so they resolved to leave city life,

and its competitive and gossipy atmosphere
behind them once and for all.

So they left Athens and started
what could best be described as a commune.

We must free ourselves from the prison
of everyday life and politics,

Epicurus wrote, and that’s
precisely what they did.

The life was simple,
but at least they enjoyed their freedom.

They didn’t mind if they looked shabby, or
didn’t have as much money as other people,

because they were self-sufficient,
and had gained their independence

from what other people thought.
There was, in a financial sense,

nothing to prove.

Epicurus believed there was a third
ingredient necessary for happiness,

and that was an analysed life.
By which he meant a life in which

we take time off to reflect on our
worries, to analyse what is troubling us.

Our anxieties quickly diminish if we give
ourselves time to think them through.

And to do that we need to take
a step back from the noisy distractions

of the commercial world, and to find time
and space for quiet thinking

about our lives.

Of course, having loads of money
has never made anyone unhappy,

but I think the lovely idea in
Epicurus is that if you’re denied money

for whatever reason, and yet you have
his 3 goods, that is you’ve got friends,

you’ve got an analysed life,
and you’re self-sufficient,

then you’ll never be denied happiness.

And conversely, if you’ve got loads of
money but you’re lacking friends,

you haven’t got a self-sufficient life,
you’re not doing a lot of analysing,

then you’ll never be happy,
according to Epicurus.

So if we try and draw this relationship
between happiness and money on a graph,

imagine that on this side of the graph
you’ve got levels of happiness,

and then on this side you’ve got
levels of income, for Epicurus,

so long as you’ve got enough money
to provide you with the essentials of life

you can start to be happy fairly early on,
if you have his 3 goods.

You won’t get any happier the more
money you accumulate,

the level of happiness stays pretty steady.
However, if you’ve got loads of money,

yet you haven’t got any friends,
you’re not self-sufficient,

you’ve got loads of anxieties,then
you’re level of happiness

is going to stay very flat.

And I think that’s a lovely consoling idea
for anyone who’s either worried about

the fact that they may lose their money
or is denied the chance to make any.

Narrator: But if the ingredients of happiness
are so simple, why aren't

more of us actually happy?
Epicurus blamed advertising.

As we've just seen, advertising can be
enormously seductive;

it tends to make us feel that there are
all sorts of things missing from our lives.

But Epicurus insisted that we only need
three things to be happy:

friends, freedom and an analysed life.
If he's right, why then do

we want to shop so much?

Epicurus' answer would be that the
commercial world slyly associates the things

it wants to sell us with the things
it knows that we need.

So for example, this might persuade
us to buy Bacardi,

but only by blurring the fact that its
really the friends that we're looking for.

This one tries to sell us perfume
by naming it after the thing

we're all really after: freedom.

And this one flogs us whiskey by promising
the calm resolution of our problems

that only an analysed life
could bring us.

And it's this blurring of our

desires that makes us so confused
about what it is we want.

What are the most important things
that make you happy?

--Umm, the people around me, if
theyre happy then I'm happy, umm,

and like if works going good then
that makes me happy as well.

But do you ever think,
what if I threw all this away,

threw all that away, all these jumpers,
and just concentrated on getting work right,

getting a family and friends right
I would never have to go to the

Trafford centre again.

Steven: Yeah, because if I shop to cheer myself
up, if I'm already happy then I dont need

to cheer myself up do I?

Steven: So at the minute Im fairly happy so I'm
not shopping quite as much as I used to,

but who's to say that next week
something might happen and then

I'll just have to go and shop.

Epicurus may have lived more than
two thousand years ago but he would've

understood the pressures that make people
like Steven shop so much, and he had a bold

and practical solution to counter them.
The place to find it is here in a dusty

and remote corner of South-Western Turkey.
That Epicurus should still speak to us

at all is something of a miracle,
as every one of the three hundred books

that he wrote has been lost. But his
philosophy developed into a kind of creed,

almost like a religion, and remained
popular for some four hundred years.

Epicurean communities were founded in places
like this, all across the ancient world. And

it's largely thanks to them that fragments
of what Epicurus wrote have survived.

Narrator: I've come with local Archaeologist
Mustufu Adak to see the ruins of .

the ancient town of Oinoanda.

Oinoanda was once home to

twenty five thousand people;
a place with a lavish theatre,

a busy market place, or agora,
and a huge aquaduct.

It was also home to a follower

of Epicurus' philosophy, one of the
wealthiest citizens of the town,

a man called Diogenes, of Oinoanda.

Around the AD 120s, this Diogenes took
a highly unusual decision,

he paid for an enormous wall to be put
up as part of a giant structure

known as a Stoa, on which he
had inscribed Epicurus'

entire philosophy of happiness,
so that all the citizens of his town

could learn and be inspired by it.

Botton: Where are we walking now?
Mustufu: We are walking now in the old agora

where Diogenes had his Stoa.

Botton: What we're seeing now
is bits of the wall.

Mustufu: This wall was broken up by an earthquake,
most probably,

and there are more than
two-hundred fragments of the inscription.

This is one of the fragments;
this is the beginning of the inscription.

Botton: And this is where
Diogenes tries to explain why he

put up the wall in the first place

Mustufu: Yes, hes saying that if there
were one or two persons who are lost,

he could educate them personally,
but there are more, many people,

So he decided to put up this stone.

So if there were just one or two people
who didn't know how to be happy,

he'd go and talk to them,
but because there are so many the best way

to help them is to actually put up
a wall in the middle of the town.

That's right, that's the explanation
he gives here in this part.

Botton: What a lovely thing to do.
Diogenes was acting on a crucial

idea in Epicurus, that in order to live
wisely, it isn't enough just to read a

philosophical argument once or twice;
we need constant reminders

of it, or we'll forget.
When we're encouraged to go shopping

by bright lights and inviting displays
we're quickly liable to lose

sight of our true desires.

So we have to counteract the influence

of advertising by creating advertisements
which say what we really do need,

and that's why Diogenes put up his wall.

Mustufu: ...and I think this door collapsed then.

Botton: What is this here?

Mustufu: This is another very
fascinating fragment...

Narrator: The massive limestone wall
originally stood right next

to the marketplace of the town.

Inhabitants shopping in the
boutiques of Oinoanda

were warned to expect little
happiness from the activity.

Luxurious food and drinks, says one
fragment, in no way protect you from harm;

wealth beyond what is natural is no more
use than an over-flowing container.

Real value is generated not by
theatres and bars, perfumes and ointments,

but by philosophy.

The wall may have crumbled into ruin,
but movingly the ideas inscribed

on it retain their life and their relevance.

Botton: It strikes me as a real
paradox really,

that you would've had where people
were doing their shopping,

they're sort of carrying their shopping,
and then on the wall you've got these

reminders that shopping is
not necessarily going to make you happy.

Mustufu: Yes, the letters of the inscription
were red so that everyone could see them...

Oh right, so it was all written in red?
Mustufu: In red yes.

So you really could have seen it,
you could've been at the other side

of the marketplace and you would’ve
seen that there was this kind

of advertisement almost,
for Epicureanism on the wall.

Botton: It must've been a beautiful spot;
I mean to have not only philosophy

enlightening you but also a fantastic
view onto the surrounding countryside.

I can imagine it would've been easy to be
wise, not easy but easier to be wise here.

I would've done less shopping if
I had this wall and this surrounding.

Botton: It's a pity they didn't do it
more, and that they dont do it today,

I think its a lovely idea.
Mustufu: Yes

Narrator: If Epicurus and his followers had
been alive today they wouldn't have been

sniffy about advertising, they
would've enlisted it for their own ends.

And for the same reason that
Diogenes built his wall:

to counter the constant inducements
to go shopping with some

equal inducements to live philosophically.

Man: First idea is basically try

ironic statements like,
shop your blues away.

Narrator: I've come to the kind of place
were Epicureans might have turned:

the offices of the advertising agency
St. Lukes, to get ideas for creating some

modern public reminders of
how to live wisely.

The first idea their creative team
came up with was a sarcastic campaign,

satirising the materialistic messages of
most ads.

Woman: This is really powerful,

certainly in production terms it takes a
number of additions

but its very very cheap.
Man: And then a bit more challenging,

be happy with shopping, TV and
yearly holidays.

Botton: Right, I love that, that really
does sum it all up, doesn't it?

Man: I thought this was the strongest-
fill the void in your life with a product

Botton: And youd have shops advertising,
shops selling these kind of products

and then this stark reminder that
perhaps it's not really

going to fill any void.

Its brilliant, thank you Steve.

Man: The most obvious idea was just

to take luxury items and goods and
somehow undermine them or show them

for being a bit shallow or a
bit kind of, empty inside.

The best example we've got is something
like this, just taking a lovely image of a

beautiful house and just using the
language of advertising,

the caveat is, batteries not included, and
just changing it to happiness not included.

Botton: Right, I really like that,
in a way that says it all doesn't it?

It says, it keeps that subtlety
of Epicureanism, which is,

you could be happy in a house like that,
but it's not included.

It's not saying that you won't be happy in
that house, which would be sort of Marxism,

it's just saying it's not included
so you better watch out before

you spend all your energies
trying to get this house.

Narrator: Unfortunately philosophers have rarely
had much money for advertising campaigns,

but imagine a world where instead
of being surrounded by adverts

selling you watches, cars or fancy holidays.
these ads remind you of how important

it is to value friends to escape
the rat race or reflect on your problems

and didn't just use these genuinely nice
things to sell you aftershave or aperitifs.

It's hard to know whether
the people of Oinoanda

discovered what they did need and ceased
buying what they didn't because of a

giant advertisement in their midst.

But Epicurus' central message seems,
if anything, more relevant to today's

consumer society than it did to his own,
and theres no reason to believe

that happiness is any more included in the
many more things we can buy.

Of course, putting up one poster
in the Trafford centre in Manchester

couldn't on its own turn back
the tide of consumerism and,

although shoppers seemed interested
in what my ad was trying to say,

I didn't see much evidence of
people stopping shopping.

But the fact remains,
we're horribly confused about

what could make us happy,
if we really knew what we needed

there are few things we'd
be desperate to buy.

Botton: Epicurus makes us think very
carefully about the merits of our own society,

of course these societies are enormously
wealthy, we can buy almost anything

we want in a place like this, full
of colourful shops selling wonderfully

well produced goods, and
yet what Epicurus wants us to think is,

do places like this really provide
us with the key ingredients of happiness,

and he thought, and I think he was right,
that they don't.

Happiness may be difficult to attain,
Epicurus admitted that,

but he insisted that the obstacles
are not primarily financial.