Some say that our age is too hedonistic. We possess a dopamine culture, live in an age of indulgence, and amuse ourselves to death.
We pursue feeling good and avoid feeling bad. If anyone does something they enjoy, who is to judge them? To do so would be to senselessly moralize. The pursuit of happiness is the pursuit of pleasure – and who would want to rob anyone of happiness?
So we retreat into our own worlds – but does the result even feel that good?
I don’t think so. This suggests we may have more to learn from the ancient hedonists.
The Epicureans held that the best pleasure is felt in the absence of pain. It is not a temporary high, but contentment. Seneca quoted them so often because they believed, like the Stoics, that the good life is one where we’ve mastered our desires. We’ve talked about them before.
The Cyrenaics are closer to the modern picture of a hedonist. For them, life was about momentary, intense pleasures.
The “dopamine hit” from social media, the excitement of gambling, and the ecstasy of music – all of these things qualified as goods for them.
But even here there is much to learn. Much of what we call the hedonic treadmill involves chasing things that we do not actually enjoy. Striving for a new car, house, career, fashion sense, body, whatever it is. A lot of this is driven by borrowed desires. Mimetic and status-driven – things we learn to want.
Think of someone who’s talked out of a hobby because it’s “childish,” or someone prone to a neurotic obsessiveness with their duties, such that they miss out on the pleasure of their relationships, or even someone who makes moral judgments that are often correct but stand in the way of feeling “at ease in any society.” Think of “successful people” – are they having fun?
Consider the positive examples, from a role model of hedonism, Aristippus, the founder of Cyrenaicism:
Being reproached for his extravagance, he said, “If it were wrong to be extravagant, it would not be in vogue at the festivals of the gods.”
Being once asked what advantage philosophers have, he replied, “Should all laws be repealed, we shall go on living as we do now.”
This is not a man who would be stuck “doomscrolling.” His hedonism has an art to it.
Diogenes, washing the dirt from his vegetables, saw [Aristippus] passing and jeered at him in these terms, “If you had learnt to make these your diet, you would not have paid court to kings,” to which his rejoinder was, “And if you knew how to associate with men, you would not be washing vegetables.” Being asked what he had gained from philosophy, he replied, “The ability to feel at ease in any society.”
One can argue that our age is suffering not from the pursuit of pleasure as such, but from a failure to be skilled hedonists.
Aristippus didn’t pursue pleasure mindlessly, but sought joy relentlessly. This required mastery of his desires and competence.
Of course, the hedonist project is not the Stoic one. Happiness isn’t just feeling good – and we should pursue excellence, not pleasure.
The Stoic knows that many social conventions are worth following and that pleasure carries risk. After all, Musonius Rufus said the following:
It was the height of shamelessness to think about how weak our bodies are when enduring pain, but to forget how weak they are when experiencing pleasure.
There is wisdom in this line.
But Aristippus shows that the pleasures that we pursue reveal a lack of hedonistic ambition: the momentary pleasures of social media and isolated urban life, instead of the pleasures of independence, adventure, and simplicity that the Cyrenaics modeled.
It takes courage to enjoy life well, rather than settle for what’s easy and expected.