Ryan Holiday

Although the Epicureans themselves, although they had this reputation as being hedonists, talk about this too, you know, the idea of that it's not just how you feel when you are getting the thing, but how do you feel after the regret or the shame or the pain that you inflicted on someone else?

So, yeah, I don't think the Stoics were anti-pleasure, but they did look at it with some skepticism and they prioritized it differently than, you know, we got to, again, imagine who Marcus Aurelius is seeing quite often.

And we can kind of see better pictures of this in Epictetus's writing.

So Epictetus lives in the court of Nero.

And although he is quite powerless, he's surrounded by very powerful, rich and important people.

And he sees the ways in which they are actually more enslaved than he is because they're trying to be richer than other people.

They're trying to outdo each other.

They can't endure setbacks or, you know, sort of ordinary life because they've become so soft and entitled by their pleasures.

So I think...

Marcus and the sort of general stoic writings, when we hear them talking about pleasure, we should probably contextualize how often this is a reaction against the decadence and the overindulgence of people of their class and space.

Right.

Like there's a story that Epictetus tells about this Roman who who, you know, spends through most of their money and they go to to Nero and they go in.

hey, I'm like basically down to my last million dollars.

And Nero goes like, oh, my God, how can you bear that?

Like the idea of of not being a millionaire was, you know, the worst fate that these guys could imagine.

That's how sort of spoiled and out of touch they were.

Right.

And so I think that's kind of the pleasure that that the Stoics are reacting against.

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