Epicurus's Vision About Happiness 

Epicurus was a great philosopher who lived in Greece during 341BC-270BC. Among his great works was about what makes us happy. He thinks that having money is not a solution to all our problems as most of us think. He explains that the key to happiness is fundamentally based on three things. They are having good friends to connect with, freedom and spending time on self assessment. He says that, the level of happiness doesn’t increase after accumulating more than a certain level of money.

If we have good friends to connect with having similar aspirations and attitude, we can collaborate with them and feel a sense of belongingness and can grow together. It gives a tremendous level of satisfaction when there are many things to be shared with.

Another aspect he talks about is freedom. Freedom according to him is connected with self sufficiency, financial independency, not answerable to horrible bosses. We should free ourselves from everyday life of politics. If we are self sufficient in life we are less bound on something and have a sense of freedom.

The third ingredient to have happiness as thought by Epicurus was an analyzed life by which he meant a life in which we take time off to reflect on our worries, to analyze what is troubling us. Our anxieties quickly diminish if we give ourselves time to think it through.

He says that the biggest challenge why we think that the materials around us can make us happy is advertisement. Advertisement can be enormously seductive. Most of the advertisement make us feel that there are whole lot of things we are missing from our lives.

Some of the quotes by Epicurus are

"Wealth beyond what is natural are no more useful than an overflowing container".

"Real value is generated not by theatres or perfumes or ointments but by philosophy".