Where do we get the orientation we all need to guide us from pain to pleasure, from stress to happiness, from confusion to clarity? Who gives us what kind of orientation today in which form with what intent?
We learn very early which way to turn our face to get milk from mother’s breast or avoid a slap from mother’s hand, where to go for food, comfort, company and when to stop touching a hot stove. Our senses and our physical environment teach us what is good and healthy for us by producing a feeling of pleasure. What is bad for our health produces disgust. Pleasure and pain are the basic stop-and-go signals for our individual survival.
This would be enough if we weren’t so very social. But humans cannot survive on their own and therefore the social group will also teach us what is good and bad for the survival of the group. The group’s teachings might differ from what we learned through our direct sense feedback. Your senses tell you to devour all the food but if you don’t share it with (some of) your group members they might punish you and not share with you their food the next time.
So you learn to work out your survival strategies balancing your individual needs as felt by your drives and tastes with the group values as experienced through daily practice, learning conflict and expectation management. This is hard enough and it takes years to find your place in the group in such a way that you can still live also according to your personal drives and tastes.
Your job to find orientation will get even more difficult or even impossible if your social environment keeps on sending you ambiguous messages by, e.g., commanding you not to lie but at the same time everybody lying to you about a life after death.
As a consequence you will be disoriented and will try to work out strategies to get along within this system. You can choose to conform to the system and pretend to follow its rules, being incongruent with your own inner beliefs. Or you can choose “to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing” become incongruent with the value system and acceptable behavior patterns of your social environment. In both cases you will ruin your mental and possibly also your physical health. You will perceive the most widespread incongruities mostly as conscience conflicts and stress.
What can you do if you don’t wish stress to ruin your health and happiness? What other options can you have?
You could find a value system linked to behavior patterns and corresponding lifestyles in a congruent manner. In other words you might seek and find people who walk their talk and their thoughts, words and acts are congruent not only among themselves but they resonate with your own deepest needs as well.
I have good news for you: There is such a proven and viable model of pragmatic and easy to follow values system. It is the 2300-years-old practical Epicurean philosophy. It makes it easy to be honest and happy at the same time. It has been hushed up and defamed by the competing philosophies and worldviews of the Platonist, Stoic, Skeptic as well as Christian theoreticians and theologians but it never stopped giving simple practical orientation to reasonable, rational and honest people. For an enormously long period of 800 years, from 300 BCE till 500 CE (almost four times longer than the whole history of the US!), it was even the most widespread worldview and lifestyle of the non-fanatical, pragmatic middle class of the Greek and Roman world.
Professional philosophers mostly know how relevant Epicurean attitudes, worldview and life conduct are today and how many of our stress-related and ecological problems would be solved if we only adopted and applied them. Unfortunately they don’t know how to say all this in simple language that is understandable also for everybody. The overwhelming majority of psychologists and sociologists, educators and life coaches has either never heard about Epicureanism or if they did, they erroneously believe that it is about eating and drinking. On the other hand they are churning out ever “new” happiness recipes, as if re-inventing the wheel every week.
Epicurean happiness guidance is available for everyone who needs orientation but cannot accept childish myths or spiritual hocus-pocus supplied by organizations, groups or individuals with the aim of turning you into a docile instrument for their profit/power increasing machinery. Re-discovering the Epicurean system of values, attitudes and behaviour patterns will make you feel reborn in a friendly and sustainable world, enabling you to live in harmony with yourself and with your social and natural environment.
Stefan Streitferdt – “stressFREEDOMguide” is the title coined to express my calling and my favorite pastime with one word. As you might legitimately expect I have