Jonny Thomson on Epicurus, Hedonism, and the Good Life

Jonny Thomson

I'm not a selfish person — I think I'm quite other-regarding, actually. I have many friends and I care for them deeply. I have family, and I care for them deeply too. Other people are very important to my happiness and my own individual pleasure.

Jonny Thomson

That's one of the many misrepresentations of Epicureanism throughout history — as a kind of navel-gazing, self-obsessed, egoistic philosophy. It isn't that at all. Before we even get into the philosophy, look at the biography: the Epicureans, let alone Epicurus himself, were hugely friendly people, and they lived in a community called the Garden, which was the closest thing you could find in the ancient world to an egalitarian commune — slaves, foreigners, women, and Athenian citizens all together. Even their critics, Augustine and Cicero among them, recognised them as remarkably friendly people, because they placed friendship among the greatest things in life. Epicurus's own line is that of everything nature provides to make us happy, the greatest is friendship. Friends were so central to them that they were known collectively as "the friends of Epicurus."

So biographically, that's the interesting thing. But philosophically too, they're not selfish, because the neat modern delineation we draw between selfish and selfless, egoistic and altruistic, would have struck the ancient world as nonsense — it's there in Plato, where the distinction between me as an individual and the polis, the community that raised me, simply doesn't hold. Epicureanism is about maximising pleasure and minimising pain, and both halves matter for other people. When Epicureans talk about pain, they mean mostly mental pain — what we might now call anxiety or distress, what they called tarachē, disturbance. Seeing someone else in pain causes disturbance to most of us; that's what we'd call a conscience today, and you see embryonic versions of the idea in Epicureanism. If a close friend is doubled over with a stomach ache, that causes me distress too — probably not the same degree as it causes them, but distress nonetheless, and helping them alleviates my own pain.

And then there's the pleasure side of friendship. Epicurus distinguishes two kinds: kinetic, or moving, pleasures, and catastematic, or settled, pleasures — and friendship gives you both. There's the kinetic pleasure of getting drunk with friends, going to football, going running, joining a book club, dancing. But there's also the catastematic pleasure — the settled peace of simply knowing your friends are there, that they will support you. That peace is what you feel sitting on a sofa or around a table with people you trust.

Jonny Thomson

Epicurus was always there, floating in the background, and my career and my interests pushed me toward him. I found myself talking more and more about happiness, partly because it interests me and partly — bluntly — because content about happiness performs well. But I'd also done a lot of writing and videos on happiness and kept feeling something big was being missed: that happiness needs to feel good, that it's something we want, something we like. There's a cliché that gets rattled out by philosophers and psychologists, which is that people wrongly conflate happiness with pleasure and ignore eudaimonic happiness — flourishing, growth, and so on. I actually think we've overcorrected the other way: we obsess too much over eudaimonic happiness as something recognised only in hindsight, only at the end of a life. I think happiness needs to feel good, and it needs to be something we're aiming towards and in control of.

That's what drew me to Epicureanism over Stoicism, Platonism, Cynicism, or Scepticism: it accepts that happiness should feel good — it's tied to pleasure — and it holds that you're in control of your own happiness, which you don't get in the Christian tradition, where beatitude depends on God, and you might or might not receive it.

Jonny Thomson

Third century BC — a century after the death of Alexander the Great, which is actually relevant. Alexander's empire brought a certain stability that let trade and philosophy flourish; in the turmoil after his death — war, conflict, sieges — Epicureanism, Stoicism, Cynicism, and Scepticism, what we now call the eudaimonic schools, were all born in this febrile age.

Epicurus himself knew a good deal of that distress firsthand. He was a colonist — his family were on Samos — and he went back to Athens at sixteen to claim citizenship and do his military service; while he was there, his parents were expelled from the island. He was later besieged in Athens by Demetrius Poliorcetes in 287 BCE, during a dreadful famine. There's a story that the Garden survived by rationing beans, and that Epicurus opened his own kitchen and gave every member of the community — regardless of status — an equal share.

I'll say, too, that the Garden had genuinely cultish elements, and it's one of the things I don't think you should adopt wholesale. Students kept a bust of Epicurus, recited his teachings daily, and held a monthly ritual meal on the twentieth — the Eikas — where they'd also recite the lives of departed friends. Epicurus alone was considered the wise master; everyone else worked their way up beneath him. And yet I understand why he did it: ritual, knowing where you're meant to be and when, makes people happy and relieves anxiety — one of the better things religion offers that a godless philosophy has to replace some other way.

Jonny Thomson

Essentially, the Epicureans were deists. They believed the gods existed, but as irrelevant, self-obsessed beings — the way you probably don't care what the ants across the road are doing under a rock. The gods have their own concerns.

Jonny Thomson

Two reasons. One is the "Epicurean hypothesis" — the idea that the world is a cosmic accident, atoms colliding to create the universe, essentially a materialist, scientific worldview; he was an atomist who believed matter was made of indivisible particles, which is what "atom" originally meant, even if we've since split them. The second is the problem of evil: Epicurus was among the first to articulate it in a recognisable form — if evil exists, God either doesn't know about it, can't fix it, or won't. Both associations, in his view, were mistaken.

What we don't know for certain is his mother's role: she seems to have been some kind of travelling amulet-seller, and there's a rumour, possibly slanderous, that young Epicurus accompanied her. If true, it may be where he came to see religion as a source of anxiety and false consolation — offering people fear of an afterlife and the very real dread that a god might appear and demand you change your ways or be destroyed.

Jonny Thomson

It matters. It's one reason I wouldn't call myself a Stoic: Stoicism, taken seriously — Zeno, Cleanthes, Marcus Aurelius — carries real theology, a cosmic conflagration and rebirth, a fiery pneuma that makes up the logos. Modern Stoics like Ryan Holiday don't buy into that layer, and Stoicism survives without it, but then it isn't really the ancient system any more — it's closer to psychology. Epicurean metaphysics is different: it's much closer to a modern scientific worldview, and once you take the afterlife out of the picture, this life takes on far greater importance. If your worldview holds that a better afterlife is coming, this one starts to look like a mere waiting room.

The same problem shows up with Stoic virtue: if the greatest good is virtue, and virtue is tied to aligning yourself with the logos, that makes sense within the system — but strip out the logos and the question becomes, why be virtuous at all? The Epicurean answer is straightforward: because it makes you happy and brings you pleasure. For the Stoic, happiness is almost an accidental byproduct of virtue, a "preferred indifferent" you don't aim at directly — though Epicurus himself has a line to the effect that it's impossible to be happy without being just, kind, and compassionate. Virtue is instrumentally valuable for the Epicurean, not the highest good in itself.

Jonny Thomson

A lot of that suspicion of pleasure comes from thinking only of kinetic pleasures — the peaks: drinking, partying, even something as small as watching a sunrise. Those can be genuinely problematic, and Epicureans would agree. But they'd say the greatest pleasure is really peace, contentment, being pain-free — what's called ataraxia, peace of mind.

Epicurus agreed with Aristotle that to talk about human happiness, we have to talk about what we're aiming towards. The good, he argued, has to satisfy two criteria: it must be available to us from the very start of being human, and it must be something everything aims at. All complex animals — and arguably everything below them — aim towards pleasure and recoil from pain; that's the basic pull and push of biology and physiology, let alone psychology. So it makes sense to define the good as something we actually want, and I've never met anyone who wants pain rather than pleasure.

Jonny Thomson

"Ought" is bound up with deontology, with duty, and that concept didn't really exist in the ancient world, certainly not in Epicureanism. Pleasure as "the good" functions more as a value than an ethical judgement — it's good in the sense that it's wanted, not "the right thing to do." What we'd now file under "ought" and ethics, Epicurus would call justice, and Epicureanism treats justice as a local, contractual matter — what we'd now call contractarianism: you form an agreement with others not to harm each other, and justice exists within that contract. That's quite different from the Stoics, the first cosmopolitans, who held that we have ethical responsibilities to everyone in the world. Epicureanism says virtue is instrumentally valuable to your own happiness, and justice exists between the parties to a given contract — full stop.

Jonny Thomson

Bentham's "two sovereign masters," pleasure and pain — I use that language in the book too, it's a good image. The major difference is that utilitarianism was built into a political and ethical system: most liberal democracies still run, in effect, on maximising aggregate utility. Epicureanism was never that. It's about my own pleasure, and about me as an animal — how do I get the most pleasure and avoid the most pain. At the far extreme of utilitarianism you get people like Peter Singer arguing we have close to an equal duty to a distant stranger's child as to our own. Epicureanism pushes the dial the other way entirely — call it localism: what's in front of me, what I can act on with my own hands, matters more, and that will inevitably be my own loved ones, my friends, my small pocket of the world. Not everyone will accept that; some will insist we do have an equal duty to every human regardless of proximity. Epicurus says no — justice is between the parties to a contract, and my pleasure will always be rooted in my own local patch of the universe.

Jonny Thomson

It's a real issue, and Mill faced the same problem with utilitarianism — his answer, ranking higher and lower pleasures, is basically an admission that not all pleasures are equal, which most people agree is a bit snobbish, and arguably a retreat from strict utilitarianism altogether.

Epicureanism has a couple of different outs. First, I'd challenge whether a genuinely level-headed, settled, happy psychopath is even coherent — the evidence suggests people with those traits tend to be deeply distressed and unhappy in other respects; being truly settled in your pleasure while also being a sadist looks contradictory. Second, Epicureans insist you have to be deliberate about your happiness: say the sadist gets a spike of pleasure — a kinetic pleasure — from torturing a cat. As with any pleasure, you risk becoming addicted, so be careful you don't become addicted to torturing cats. And you're exposing yourself to future pain: the constant anxiety of eventually being caught — think of the paranoia that consumes the murderer in Crime and Punishment — and then, if caught, a genuinely brutal existence, surrounded by other criminals, in conditions Dostoevsky describes in The House of the Dead. Historically, and in much of the world today, that's a desperately painful fate.

Jonny Thomson

Epicurus would agree with you about the shaman scenario, and this is one of the biggest reasons he disliked religion: the moment you say the afterlife or the divinities matter more than what's actually in front of you, things become genuinely dangerous and genuinely unhappy. But does it become unhappy for you, the dictator? Universalise it: would you want to live in a society where human sacrifice is normalised, where you might wake up one day and find your own child selected? That would be horrifying and distressing — so religion of that kind is itself anxiety-inducing, and living in that society would be bad for everyone, including, eventually, the dictator. I can't imagine a real dictator who isn't constantly anxious, looking over their shoulder — and if you look at history, most dictators come to a pretty bad end. Epicurus in fact recommended staying out of politics altogether, precisely because of that anxiety.

Jonny Thomson

What you're describing there is an intentional, dystopian erasure of conscience — and Epicureanism does contain the first embryonic ideas of what we'd now call a conscience. Having a guilty conscience is itself a great source of anxiety; a society that had to deliberately lobotomise people's capacity for guilt in order to function is not a happy society, and its members, including the ones enjoying the privilege, are not happy in the sense Epicureanism cares about. There are people who live such hard lives that they do harden themselves to the world's realities — conscience, in that sense, can be a luxury of comfortable times — but that doesn't rescue the broader picture. I talk in the book about Martha Nussbaum's capability approach: there are baseline things all humans need to be happy, and one of them is the assurance that I, or my friends, won't be dragged away in the night to be sacrificed. Losing that assurance is corrosive to ataraxia regardless of how the arithmetic is arranged.

Jonny Thomson

I largely agree with Anil Seth's "beast machine" view here — every instance of consciousness we know of has existed within an organic framework. We ascribe consciousness and personality to things because they mimic certain kinds of intelligence, and the one we weight most heavily is communicative fluency, which is exactly what large language models are good at. But there are other intelligences — emotional intelligence, even playful intelligence — that AI doesn't obviously have. So I don't think AI has consciousness as we'd understand it; it's very good at communicating, which we mistake for more.

Jonny Thomson

It's a genuinely interesting thought experiment I hadn't been asked before. The question is whether "good" and "bad" here are meant as objective values existing outside humans. Epicureans would likely grant that pleasure exists in other animals too — primates, mammals, fish — so the pleasure principle isn't uniquely human. But I'd want a different word for whatever an artificial system "feels": I think all pleasure we know of exists within an evolutionary, embodied system, and Epicureanism is built on the assumption that we're animals shaped by that history. Whatever pleasure would mean for a genuinely conscious AI, it wouldn't be that — it wouldn't be embodied in the same sense. So either the Epicurean ethic only applies to biological beings, which raises its own problem of how we govern artificial minds, or you'd have to say it really is the right thing for that entity to do, and it becomes a straightforward contest between its pleasure and ours.

Jonny Thomson

There are really two versions. In the first, you're entirely ignorant that you're in the machine — you believe it's real. In the second, you know it's illusory even while enjoying it. Epicureans do have a problem with the second version, because being duped, or knowing you're being duped, is itself a source of anxiety and pain — but each person has to weigh whether that background anxiety outweighs the pleasure on offer. And there's a wrinkle in how the thought experiment is usually posed: you can't ask someone whether they'd choose the machine without them knowing, at the moment of choosing, that it is a machine — which already contaminates the comparison.

Jonny Thomson

Not in the moment, no — because right now I'd know it's a dupe, and that knowledge itself causes real distress; you're effectively asking me to give up my wife and children for a copy. Even walking that towards it in small steps, each increment away from caring about the people I actually love would itself be a fresh act of distress. Epicureanism is careful to say that happiness is something we build through deliberation — through appreciating what we already have — and that becoming dependent on any externality for happiness tends to breed addiction, which is itself a cause of unhappiness. Trusting a stranger who tells you a single button press will make everything better is exactly the wrong kind of trust to extend — it's the same reasoning that should make you decline the offer of a "guaranteed good time" from someone selling you heroin.

Jonny Thomson

Exactly — you can push any thought experiment far enough that hypothetically murdering someone becomes "correct," but that's a comment on the thought experiment, not on how to live. It's the trolley problem all over again: people always want to know why you can't just get off the track, or nudge the lever at the perfect angle so nobody dies — which rather misses the point of running the intuition pump at all.

Jonny Thomson

The cult-like following in the Garden is one clear example. Another: he treats sex as close to a source of pure misery, and seemingly can't see why anyone would want it, or want children — which is a little rich given he was writing before contraception existed at all. I think his real point is that the consequences of sex with the wrong person at the wrong time can be genuinely bad, and that a certain irrationality comes with libido — there's a Robin Williams line I use in the book, that God gave men two heads and can only think with one at a time. There's real truth in that: people caught up in lust don't tend to think about long-term consequences, and neither does anyone three pints deep on a night out.

Jonny Thomson

Sadly, Epicurus's own views on the matter are lost to history. But the actual Epicurean method here is the useful bit, whichever side of that debate you land on: you have to be deliberate, and you have to check in with your own experience rather than following a rule blindly. If someone finds that a habit — whatever it is — is making them anxious and unhappy, that's important data, and it's worth sitting down and asking whether the habit is the cause. Equally, if someone stops a habit for months as a kind of experiment and finds themselves measurably less happy, that's also data, and it may mean the habit wasn't the problem after all. I interviewed the neuroscientist Anil Seth's colleague on cold-water plunging, and it's similar there: probably good for most people without underlying conditions, but for some the anxiety of forcing yourself into a cold bath every morning outweighs any physiological benefit. You have to make that judgement for yourself.

That's the misreading of Epicureanism as "just do the pleasurable thing" — go on, have the takeaway, indulge the urge. The actual Epicurean has to accept that the moment a pleasure stops serving long-term, settled happiness, it becomes the wrong thing to pursue. And that requires real self-examination — checking in with your emotions, ideally with friends, in a diary, or with a therapist, not only a clinical one. You have to be willing to notice, "actually, that was a wrong turn, I'm worse off now" — or the reverse.

Jonny Thomson

I'm highly sensitive to that, but I've made peace with it two ways. First, I think of myself as a gateway drug to further reading — I like to think people will go and look things up themselves afterwards. Second, I suspect that what the ancient schools were actually doing, most of the day, was exactly this kind of relaxed, accessible talk — the condensed, highly philosophical texts handed down to us are not what daily life in the Garden or the Academy or the Stoa actually sounded like; they'd have been chatting, shooting the philosophical breeze, much as we're doing now. In that sense, we're the modern equivalent of those schools — rival, but also friends, meeting at our own version of the feast.

And there is a real publishing phenomenon here: you could write a serious book on ancient Greek metaphysics and a publisher will ask you to reframe it as "how this ancient thinker can fix your friendships." A great deal of the self-help genre runs on this same promise of agency — how to think your way to happiness, wealth, fitness — and Epicureanism is very much in line with that, in the sense that it holds you're fundamentally in control of your own happiness.

Jonny Thomson

Actually, I think Stoicism and Epicureanism are more aligned here than people assume. Put an Epicurean, a Stoic, and a Benedictine monk side by side, and — a few philosophical differences aside — they'd behave in very similar ways. Epicurus has lines urging you to prepare for the future, to do the hard work now so that whatever comes, you're better placed for it; the Stoics later lifted a good deal of this and rebadged it as their own. There's a shared ancient virtue, autarky, self-sufficiency, though it looks slightly different in each school. Stoicism talks about cultivating indifference, so that when catastrophe inevitably arrives — illness, bereavement, ruin — you're ready for it. Epicureanism approaches the same problem through virtue and, above all, through friendship as a kind of insurance policy: Epicurus himself endured terrible physical pain throughout his life — probably Crohn's disease, and he eventually died of kidney stones, one of the most painful ways to go. In a letter near the end, unable to urinate for days, he wrote that the only thing still giving him pleasure was the memory of conversations with his friends. Given how painful and precarious life was in the post-Alexander world, cultivating good friends in advance was, for Epicurus, the best available preparation for hardship — where the Stoics, while they also value friendship, hold themselves more deliberately indifferent towards it.

The genuine differences between the two schools come down to three things. The first is theological: the ancient Stoics carried real religious content — the logos, the cosmic pneuma, a great conflagration and rebirth, a degree of immortality of the soul — which Epicureanism, being deistic and materialist, rejects outright. Second is the question of the highest good: Stoicism holds that virtue itself is the telos, with happiness merely a "preferred indifferent" on the way; Epicureanism holds that virtue is instrumental to happiness or pleasure, not the goal itself. Third, and more of a modern critique: Stoicism places an arguably unrealistic expectation on a detached reason that stands apart from emotion, judging feelings as worthy or unworthy from a kind of view from nowhere. I don't think that's how human judgement actually works — Antonio Damasio's work on emotion and reasoning makes the same point — our emotions aren't separable extras that reason inspects from outside; they're wired into how we experience and judge the world in the first place.

Jonny Thomson

I hope so — I'd like to spearhead it myself. Part of the reason is a concerted anti-Epicurean tradition running through Stoicism and then Christianity, which framed Epicureanism as the enemy precisely because it says you don't need God to be happy or in control of your life. That hostility never fully went away, even though the philosophy kept resurfacing — Bentham and Mill drew on it, Erasmus liked it, and I believe Montaigne did too. Stoicism has simply been far better documented across history; we've lost a huge amount of Epicurean material. Herculaneum turned up a cache of charred scrolls, some apparently Epicurean, that we still can't open without destroying them — though imaging technology is starting to make some of them legible. It would be extraordinary if what survived turned out to include entirely mundane material, the way Newton's private papers turned out to be obsessive biblical numerology rather than more physics — our sense of these figures might shift quite a bit if the ordinary, unphilosophical parts of their lives ever resurface.

Jonny Thomson

This is another area where I'm not entirely on board with Epicurus. The official line is that we shouldn't fear death, because while we're alive death isn't present, and once we're dead we're not around to be troubled by it. Cicero's line that philosophy is learning how to die captures why this matters: if you take away the fear of death, everything the world throws at you is put into perspective.

But I don't think you can philosophise your way out of the fear of death, not fully — for a species so attuned to its own evolutionary self-preservation, I think the fear is close to universal, whatever some people claim about having made peace with it. Asked whether I'm scared of death myself, I don't spend enough time thinking about it to answer properly — partly because I'm increasingly convinced the self is something like an illusion, a bundle of processes rather than a fixed thing that could simply cease, so I sit fairly comfortably with agnosticism about it: I don't know, and I'll find out when I get there. Which is, in its way, a rather Epicurean attitude. Consistently with the philosophy, what I'm actually afraid of isn't the state of being dead — Epicurus's own point that it will resemble the time before I was born, when Cleopatra and the dinosaurs meant nothing to me — but leaving behind my children, my wife, the pleasures of the world. The fact that the moment my eyes shut I won't care about any of that doesn't make the anticipation any less frightening now. Fear is an emotion, not a proposition, and you can shift the facts that trigger an emotion without ever "rationalising the emotion itself" away.

Jonny Thomson

I think there's a meaning crisis and it's called the human condition — everybody suffers with it, whenever they're born. But I'd actually reframe it as more of a happiness crisis, or a connection crisis. I'm wary of the "meaning industry," because the people asking the question often have an agenda, the way someone selling you something does. I was once interviewed by an American host who kept pressing, "what gives you meaning?" I said my children; he said, but they won't live forever; I offered other answers, and it became obvious the only answer that would satisfy him was God. I don't think that's true of most people asking the question, but a great many of these discussions are quietly framed within a Judeo-Christian idea that only God can ground meaning — and even that answer doesn't really settle anything; it just pushes the question back a step. If God told you the meaning of your life was to count blades of grass, would that make it meaningful? No.

There are two ways to read "meaning." Literally, it's just whatever actually motivates your behaviour — your purpose, in a descriptive sense. But most people asking the question want something stronger: a non-contingent, self-justifying reason to exist, something that bottoms out somewhere ultimate. I'm sceptical that anything like that will ever be found, philosophically. But you can trace anyone's actual, practical chain of reasons: why are you here — to promote a book; why do that — because you want money; why want money — to buy a house; why that — to provide for your children; why that — because you want them to be happy. Push it far enough and most people just look at you blankly: obviously I want my children to be happy.

My own answer, in the end, is something close to: the meaning of life is to stop asking what the meaning of life is. When I'm sitting with my children on the back of a miniature steam train, at no point am I asking what it means — I'm just in it, and the moment you start asking, it rather ruins the moment. I think what we're missing isn't meaning so much as pleasure, and connection — we're increasingly atomised, disconnected from each other, closer to what Durkheim called anomie, and it's in that disconnection that the "what's the point of this" question tends to surface. When you're genuinely with people, genuinely belonging somewhere, the meaning question tends to evaporate on its own — which, I suppose, is itself a rather Epicurean answer.

Jonny Thomson

Thanks very much — always happy to do this again.