What is the point? What is the point of having had a little luck in your life? What is the point of having been in the right place at the right time, or simply being incredibly talented, if you cannot enjoy the money, share it, and have a good time with it storing up good stories and happy memories? The ultimate misery was Getty, who had a house in my home town (Guildford, Surrey) and had a public telephone installed in the house for the use of visitors (this is true because some friends actually saw it).
So these usually serious and humorless people amass huge fortunes and, guess what? Where they are going at the end of their lives their fortunes are useless. All that happen is that the kids blow it all and get to be like Paris Hilton. I have known a few people who were incredibly comfortably off who pennied and dimed everything, made scrupulous monthly accounts, the husband and wife fiddling around between them over a dollar or two. Forget it!
So to avoid consumerism and money-grubbing is one thing, and correctly Epicurean. But we should be having fun, enjoying ourselves, thirsting for life, experiencing everything, having as glorious a time as possible within our financial capabilities. Most of all we should be able to laugh at ourselves (to be argumentative, the last time I wrote something like this, there was a deathly silence. Anybody out there who agrees?) Live life while you have it.
It takes knowing oneself, a certain self-confidence and a reduction of natural fear to really live life and enjoy fully. Maybe this is why, where I live, so many people look so serious, unsmiling and miserable. This will ultimately be the downfall of the United States, not money.
Bless those who have fun, laugh and don’t take themselves seriously! We are talking about Epicureans – or should be.
An excellent post. And, as Samuel Johnson or Oscar Wilde or Henry VIII would say: “Bloody true!”
One addition to the Epicurean recipe: humility. Not the hand-wringing Uriah Heep variety. Rather, it is a sense of one’s limited place in this universe which encourages laughing at yourself.
Wealth or power carries the risk of an infectious disease: a sense of entitlement. Laughing at yourself means seeing things as they are, which is never-ending work. The older I get, the greater appreciation I have for humility in anyone I encounter. I wonder if humility is contageous?
“What’s the point?” A helpful question which I sometimes phrase this way: What’s the Meaning of the Whole Shebang? (A little rif on the “Calvin and Hobbes,” comic strip, no longer published, sorry to say).
In the Thervadan Buddhist tradition, a person begins each day, before formal meditation, reciting the “5 recollection”, which is in a sense recognizing that our lives are indeed short and we should make the best of the time we have here;
I am of the nature of aging;
I am of the nature of illness;
I am of the nature of dying;
All that I love, one day I will be separated from;
I am heir to and owner of my karma, the law of cause and effect.
It seems a little morbid to think about this on a daily basis, but I find it does make a person appreciate TODAY.
The Buddhist quote is very interesting. But what is the message? The first four lines suggest fatalism, but then the last line–about “owner of my karma” and “the law of cause and effect”–suggests a non-fatalistic view. What is the meaning of this last line? In thinking how we live our life, isn’t it important whether we are fatalistic and sit back and make the best of things or whether we try to influence our own life and events around us?
I’m certainly not a buddhist scholar, but maybe reflecting on the impermanence of our lives (and everything else) motivates us to go out into the world and do everything we can to change the world for the better; karma or the law of cause and effect simply means that what we do, think, say, etc, eventually brings us either happiness or sadness; what we sew, we reap, both in this life and possible others (in Buddhism there is no individual “I” who continues after death, but there is a stream of consciousness that is reborn over and over) how is this consistent or not with Epicurus’ teachings?