As a young man, I thought Epicureanism was a shitty, shitty philosophy. It seemed like an excuse to party while the house burned down, to put your pleasure over basically everything else.Â
I took a big Douglas Adams-themed birthday party to make me realize how wrong I was. I really should have made the connection, sooner: every hoopy frood in the Hitchhiker's Guide Trilogy knew how to fuckin' party. They needed to: they lived in a Galaxy where the laws of biology and physics (let alone those passed by the government) were completely bonkers!
Lot like ours. The closer you look at the world, the more absurd our existence seems. We're a bunch of primates with smartphones on a wet rock who could be wiped out by a stray asteroid, nuclear cockup, or a clerical error from a civilization a tick up the Kardashev scale. Every day there are a dozen different apocalypses that could annihilate what we quaintly think of as "the world," and whole political parties seemingly dedicated to making them happen *faster.*
Life is fucking absurd. Trying to fight that absurdity is equally ludicrous, because -- again -- apes with watches smarter than most of us. This is especially true on the individual level, where it's easy to rant and rage and lose hope over forces too vast to readily comprehend, much less fight.
But you can still party. Pleasure and joy are still real, even in the face of tyranny and annihilation (as real as anything in this probably-simulated universe, and certainly more real than "lunchtime.") Epicureanism is about honoring that reality, about *using* it to power through all the bullshit and absurdity that life ladles onto us. A really good song isn't going to stop an asteroid or a hyperspace bypass. Reading the best book in history won't save us from book burning assholes. But either might make it worth living through those things. Focusing on the next dance, the next book, the next episode, the next time you get to hold your beloved, or just the next Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster, is enough to get a lot of people through a *lot* of horrors.
And that's why I drifted from stoicism to Epicureanism. The universe is *absurd* and filled with shit beyond our individual power to affect. I could do my duty with flawless diligence until the day I die miserable and it won't stand a whelk's chance in a supernova of stopping a comet strike. But by writing I can make people chuckle, raise some heartrates, and have a blast doing it. I can get hammered playing with D&D my friends, and the universe won't care, but it'll be a bright spot in the grey for all of us.
And stoically doing my job well never made a kid stop crying, but singing a stupid song has, and that's gotta be worth something.
