A 2300-year-old philosophy for the age of doomscrolling
How is it that you can feel everything and nothing at the same time?
The alarm goes off – the first of many that you had set up not to be late for work. You open your eyes and hit snooze for the first couple, then the sensitive period of “almost-running-late” arrives, and you finally decide to wake up. You don’t get up though, not right away, at least. You feel paralyzed. You went to bed last night scrolling through videos of all sorts of suffering, and yet, before you even step foot on the ground, you open your favorite social media app again and continue. Two minutes turn to five, five to ten, and ten to thirty. Without even realizing it, you have just wasted half an hour of your precious morning. This is followed by another half an hour on the bus to work because instead of reading the book you have been carrying around for months, you scroll again. And another half back. And another maybe hour and a half before going to sleep that night.
How is it that you can feel everything and nothing at the same time?
You care about the world. You want things to change for the better. You have tried to do that yourself before. But how can you, when everything feels so uncertain and out of control? As it turns out, you are not the first person to feel this way, and someone, a very long time ago, thought carefully about what to do with it.
Epicurus, an ancient Greek philosopher who treated his ideas as medicine, wrote in the wake of Alexander the Great’s death when the world they had known before had been shattered completely. All of the old city-states were absorbed into vast, ungovernable empires. Ordinary people felt helpless, paralyzed, afraid, and out of control. And this is when Epicurus discovered Tetrapharmakos, a fourfold cure for unhappiness. The name served as a metaphor for an actual compound made up of four ingredients – beeswax, pitch, resin, and tallow – and used for healing wounds and inflammations of the skin.
The Epicurean version of this cure came from a papyrus at Herculaneum, a city destroyed by the sudden eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE. The text read:
“Not to be feared is God,
Not to be viewed with apprehension is death,
The good is easily acquired,
The terrible is easily endured.”
This created a simple living philosophy that defined happiness not as virtue or goodness, like with Socrates, Plato, or Aristotle, but as the highest goal of life. Epicurus was a hedonist; a true believer in experiencing the pleasures of life, but not in a “live fast, die young” kind of manner. For Epicurus, the highest pleasures were found in simplicity, submission, and friendship.
But, what does a philosopher from 300 BCE have to say to someone who cannot get out of bed in the morning?
Firstly, the idea of “not to be feared is God,” should not be misread as atheism. It is, in fact, the opposite. The conscious decision to stop living with the worry about forces beyond your control – the forces that only God can have power in determining and changing. In Ancient Greece, this meant letting go of the idea of divine punishment, but modern times call for controlling our level of news consumption more than anything else. The gripping political climate is intentionally designed to keep us engaged, fearful, and guilty for not contributing enough. But if we realize that the weight of this information was never meant to be carried by us in the first place, we can detach our energy and redirect it towards something that is actually worthwhile.
Secondly, the statement “not to be viewed by apprehension is death,” sends an emotionally powerful message for the human psyche. As Epicurus argued, death is nothing but the absence of sensation. Mortality is natural, and the quiet irrelevance of our existence that it echoes, should not be feared either. Much of the paralysis mentioned at the beginning comes from this exact fear. Being met with an overwhelming number of choices, information, and competition with other, more successful, and impactful human beings. And the more this fear sticks with your thoughts, the deeper you dive into the abyss of bite-sized content and cheap entertainment.
Thirdly, “the good is easily acquired,” introduces an interesting idea regarding pleasure. Epicurus never believed that pleasure was something you earned through a productivity agenda or continuous suffering. Pleasure was acquired, meaning it existed abundantly in the world, and in a much simpler manner than one thought. For Epicurians, pleasure was a conversation in the garden with your friends, a glass of wine and some olives on a breezy summer night, or a meal eaten slowly, while enjoying the melodies of the surrounding atmosphere. The enjoyable “good” life was no longer a destination, but rather the active practice of noticing what was already enough for you.
Lastly, the concept of “terrible is easily endured,” served as the radical acceptance of the inherent suffering that life carried. The terrible – poverty, exhaustion, famine, wars, illness, or death – would certainly come to all of you. But it would also inherently be finite and tolerable, making you more than capable of overcoming the worst moments.
Taken together, the Tetrapharmakos cure does something unusual in philosophy. Instead of motivating you to be better, wiser, healthier, or more successful as a human being, it prevents you from fearing what is outside of your control, and reminds you of the natural rhythm of life. This is where Epicurus redefines active citizenship, as well. Suddenly, your value is not measured by the grandiosity of your deeds, but by the simplest of acts that bring genuine meaning to this world. And the apathy that exists in you reveals itself not as indifference, but as mental and emotional exhaustion.
The person scrolling through countless videos of wars, global warming, or mass murders is not someone who stopped caring. But probably someone, who cared so much, for so long, without knowing anything about how to make things better, that they became numb. Here, Epicurus would ask: What is one thing, big or small, that you actually want to do? Not for the world out there, but for yourself – your moral compass, integrity, and inner drive. The person, who would act from this place of alignment and authenticity would realize that the things that restored them are also the things that restored the world around them. So, when the alarm goes off again tomorrow, what if, just for once, you let getting up be something you choose?
