Dear friend,

A thought —

What if we didn’t make our personal happiness the aim and goal of our lives. What would we pursue instead?

Download PDF: Live an epic life

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1. No ultimate ethics

Simple idea:

I don’t believe there are any universal morals, ethics, or “duties” that apply to all of humanity.

Instead, we must dictate our own personal morals, ethics, and duties for ourselves.

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2. Beyond pain and pleasure

I don’t like this motion of “happiness” too much, because in modern times we have perverted this idea into meaning “pleasure”.

I think living an epic life goes beyond pain and pleasure. Pain and pleasure are natural to all of us. I don’t think the point of life is to minimize pain and maximize pleasure. In fact, from a physiological perspective, in order to maximize pleasure you must also maximize pain. Food tastes 100x better when you do extreme fasting (pain), as compared to someone who always eat. Sex also feels much more pleasurable after abstinence.

All the ancients already knew that any pleasure that exceeds certain bounds transform into pain (too much alcohol is painful, and even too much coffee leads to pain!)

3. Epicness

A simple idea:

Let us attempt to live an epic life.

Epic is big, great, and dangerous. Epic is challenging, difficult, and hard.

Or course, you’re not required to live your life in an epic way. But I think it’s certainly less boring, it’s more interesting and more fun!

Or in colloquial terms:

Do epic shit in life!

BE BOLD,
ERIC

PHILOSOPHY >