Most advice about a good life is advice about a different life. Move somewhere, earn more, get fitter, find the work you were meant for. The life you already have, with its repeated breakfasts and the same walk to the same shop, is treated as the waiting room.
Many philosophers who thought about contentment mostly disagreed with this view.
Epicurus kept a garden and ate bread. Marcus Aurelius ran an empire and wrote notes to himself about wanting less. Rousseau said the happiest two months he ever lived were on a small island doing almost nothing.
Their advice, taken together, is less about changing your life than about looking at it differently. Here are five of the lessons they left us.
1. Want things that have a limit
The word "epicurean" now means a refined taste for expensive pleasures. However, the man it is named after lived on plain food and argued that most of what a person needs is already cheap.
In his letter to Menoeceus, preserved by the biographer Diogenes Laertius, he sorts desires into kinds: "some are natural, others are groundless; and that of the natural some are necessary as well as natural, and some natural only."
He divides desires into 3 kinds:
- Natural and necessary. These are desires you can’t do without, such as food when you’re hungry, water when you’re thirsty, and shelter from the cold. They have a natural limit: once you’ve eaten, the hunger is gone. They are typically cheap and easy to satisfy.
- Natural but not necessary. These are desires for variations on the basics, such as rich food instead of bread or fine wine instead of water. They’re still satiable, because a feast ends when you’re full just as a plain meal does. They add variety to pleasure without adding to it, so you can enjoy them when they come along without chasing them.
- Groundless (often translated “empty” or “vain”). These are desires that come from opinion rather than nature, like wealth beyond need, fame, power, and status. Unlike the first two, they have no natural stopping point. There is always more money or more recognition to want, so they can never be satisfied.
The sorting matters because of where each kind of desire ends. "Plain fare gives as much pleasure as a costly diet," he writes, once the pain of want has been removed. Hunger has a limit; a full stomach satisfies it. The appetite for standing has none, and his Principal Doctrines put that in one line: "Nature’s wealth at once has its bounds and is easy to procure; but the wealth of vain fancies recedes to an infinite distance." An ordinary life is where the limited desires get met, which is why he could call it enough. Wanting things with no natural stopping point guarantees a shortfall, because there is no moment at which the want is done.
2. Look at what you have as you once hoped for it
Marcus Aurelius wrote his Meditations for himself, and as far as we can tell, never meant them to be read. The seventh book contains the shortest technique in this list. "Think not so much of what thou hast not as of what thou hast," he writes in George Long's translation, "but of the things which thou hast select the best, and then reflect how eagerly they would have been sought, if thou hadst them not."
Epicurus had said nearly the same thing earlier, in a saying that survives in a Vatican manuscript. "Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not," it reads in the Epicurism.info collection, "but remember that what you now have was once among the things only hoped for."
The job, the flat, the friend, the car: each was at some earlier moment something you wanted and did not have. Looking at them from that earlier moment, instead of from the vantage of the next thing wanted, is the whole exercise.
Marcus adds a caution in the same note that gets left off the quote cards. Take care, he says, that being pleased with what you have does not teach you to overvalue it, "so as to be disturbed if ever thou shouldst not have them."
3. Spend time with the people you love
On this one the ancient schools seemed to agree, which is rare.
Aristotle opens the eighth book of the Nicomachean Ethics with it: "without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods."
Epicurus (who often disagreed with Aristotle) ranked friendship above every other thing a person can arrange for themselves. "Of all things that wisdom provides for living one's entire life in happiness," reads the twenty-seventh of his Principal Doctrines, "the greatest by far is the possession of friendship."
The longest-running study of adult life points the same way in numbers. The Harvard Study of Adult Development began tracking 268 Harvard sophomores in 1938 and was still following the survivors nearly 80 years later. Its director, the psychiatrist Robert Waldinger, told the Harvard Gazette in 2017 that the surprise was how much relationships mattered to health, not just happiness. "The people who were the most satisfied in their relationships at age 50 were the healthiest at age 80," he said.
4. Get outside and walk
In 1765 Jean-Jacques Rousseau spent two months on the Île de Saint-Pierre in Lake Biel, in what is now Switzerland. He wrote about it in the Fifth Walk of his unfinished Reveries of the Solitary Walker. "Of all the places I have inhabited," it begins in the anonymous 1796 translation, "none ever rendered me so truly happy, or left such pleasing impressions on my memory, as the Island of Saint Pierre, in the Lake of Bienne." What he did there, it seems, was almost nothing. When the lake was calm he lay in a boat and let it drift. When it was rough, he "passed the afternoon in walking through the island, herbalizing in all parts, or seating myself on some pleasant solitary spot." He set out to catalog every plant on the island. "I reckon these two months as the most pleasing part of my life," he writes, and asks what the pleasure consisted of. His answer: "In nothing beyond ourselves, nothing foreign to our own existence."
Philosophers have walked for a long time. Aristotle's school took its name, the Peripatetics, from the covered walkway where it met, and Nietzsche claimed that the only thoughts worth having come by walking.
There's modern evidence too. In 2019 Mathew White and colleagues at the University of Exeter analyzed survey responses from 19,806 people in England and found that "individuals who reported spending ≥120 mins in nature last week had consistently higher levels of both health and well-being than those who reported no exposure." Two hours a week was the threshold, and it "did not matter how the 'threshold' was achieved": one long visit or several short ones worked the same.
5. Live each day as if it completes the set
Seneca was in his sixties when he wrote the twelfth of his letters to Lucilius, and he opens it with a visit to a country house he owns. The building is crumbling. The gardener tells him the old plane trees are past saving. The porter, he is told, is a slave he once knew as a small boy. Each discovery is a reminder of his own age, and the letter turns on what to do with that.
His answer is to treat each day as a complete thing. A life is made of days the way a year is made of months, he argues, with the same pattern repeating, and so "every day ought to be regulated as if it closed the series, as if it rounded out and completed our existence." He then tells a story about a Roman who had made Syria his own and held his own funeral feast every evening, with music and applause, and had himself carried to bed. Seneca suggests doing the same thing from a better motive. "Let us go to our sleep with joy and gladness; let us say: I have lived." A person who can say that, he adds, "every morning he arises he receives a bonus."
None of these six lessons asks you to change your circumstances. They ask you to want things that can be had, to look at what you have as you once hoped for it, to put the curtain back, to spend the evening with people, to walk somewhere green, and to go to bed having lived. An ordinary day is where all of that happens.
