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Just started listening to the audiobook and it strikes me as eminently Epicurean!!
Starting this thread to record thoughts of mine or others as my listening continues...
Only on chapter 3 listening, but lots of good stuff. I have yet to hear anything un-Epicurean from my perspective.
It's hard to take notes from the audiobook while driving so I'll try to go back and relisten at some point.
So far, 
I am really thinking I need to get my own copy of this book.
As I'm listening to the library's audiobook in my car, I keep thinking "yep, yep, that's good, oh, that's straight out of Epicurus... Good...." and so on. I can't take notes and I don't really want to go through the aggravation of doing it with the audiobook.
I'm currently 27% of the way through and really haven't heard anything off-putting or even much if anything outside what Epicurus would be writing in the 21st century. Granted, Rucker doesn't get into epistemology or physics, but the book isn't designed that way.
So, review so far continues to be
Epicurus is not mentioned in Rucker's book, although I find his text even more Epicurean then "The Art of Frugal Hedonism."
Am reminded of the early post-apostolic Christian Justin Martyr: "Those, therefore, who lived according to reason (logos) were really Christians, even though they were thought to be atheists, such as, among the Greeks, Socrates, Heraclitus and others like them."
Well, I wouldn't want to push that too far, but still:
“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.”
(William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet)
Display MoreEpicurus is not mentioned in Rucker's book, although I find his text even more Epicurean then "The Art of Frugal Hedonism."
Am reminded of the early post-apostolic Christian Justin Martyr: "Those, therefore, who lived according to reason (logos) were really Christians, even though they were thought to be atheists, such as, among the Greeks, Socrates, Heraclitus and others like them."
Well, I wouldn't want to push that too far, but still:
“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.”
(William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet)
Speaking of Shakespeare, in a recent dive into DRN, I discovered quite a few occasions where Shakespeare shamelessly appropriates Lucretian imagery. Also, the same for Chaucer, Spenser, and Wordsworth.
Outside of Shakespeare, I'm finding explicit instances of DRN being a source of inspiration (or the target of theft) from, at least, Rousseau, Deleuze, Nietzsche, Bergson, Santayana, Gassendi, Machiavelli, Holbach, Descartes, Galileo, Locke, Hobbes, Spinoza, Freud, Horace, Dryden, Diderot, Voltaire, Frederick II, La Mettrie, Marx, Pope, Botticelli, Virgil, Jefferson, Erasmus Darwin, Shelley, Lord Byron, Newton, Halley, Tennyson, Hume, Kant, Milton, Goethe, and Bacon. (I'm currently getting high on the idea that Lucretius is the most significant individual poet of all.)
The basic premise of Rucker's book is that focusing on happiness (as it is often discussed in relation to the popular conversation in light of positive psychology) is that it emphasizes the gap between how we feel now and how we're *supposed* to feel. Why aren't we happy? Why are they happier than me? We try to - are encouraged to - quantify our level of happiness, then *work* on being happier.
What Rucker recommends is prioritizing "fun" - I'd paraphrase him by saying "prioritize taking pleasure in your life and your experiences." Of we prioritize "fun" , happiness becomes a welcome by-product. I'd rephrase saying "if we prioritize finding the pleasure in both our everyday experience and in the extravagant pleasures we occasionally experience, well-being / eudaimonia / happiness will be a welcome by-product of living that way."
I happened to find this book at my library, and I am skimming through it now. Lots of thoughts coming up.
An interesting idea that Rucker presents is the PLAY model - where you have four quadrants (four categories) that all of your activities fit into: pleasing (high fun, and easy); living (high fun; and challenging); yielding (low fun, but easy); agonizing (low fun, and hard). I've only read the first few chapters of the book so far.
*****
I feel like I need more categories than those four, so made up my own:
The thing is that sometimes we need to do things that are in the last three categories, because it may be necessary in order to prevent greater pain from arising in the future, or for the sake of procuring basic necessities, or sometimes as a basis that leads to greater pleasure in the future.
After reading some of this book, thinking...
Does fun equal novelty? Do you need to have a certain level of reoccurring novelty in life in order to feel happy? ...and I think that this could set you up for feeling unhappy if you feel like you aren't getting enough novelty. The concept of pursuing novelty could be a modern invention, created by the travel industry (big hotel corporations, big restaurant chains, and not too long ago there were travel agencies)...and it is not part of our evolution. Perhaps the idea of pursuing novelty continues to be popular because it can ease the "pains" of modern civilization (indoor desk jobs) as well as a lack of close social interactions.
