To start us off today, I'm going to read an extremely popular blog post by somebody called

Chris Gage.

She's got 87,000 followers on Medium, and this is what she has to say.

She says, we are all mere particles, molecules, and chemical makeup, on loan from the greater

universe.

We get distracted.

We forget.

We get caught up in the potato sack costume that we wear day to day, which is our ego.

But we must remember, we are just one mutation, one coincidence, away from being an

aspensappling, a dung beetle, volcanic magma.

So what's funny is, we're doing this survey of Hellenistic philosophical systems, and

we started last week with stoicism, which is having kind of like a moment right now.

There are a lot of people using stoicism as a way of life, as a kind of self-help technique,

kind of like looking to the stoics as ancient life coaches.

And I argued that there's something that's fair about that, but you also have to go deeper

to really understand kind of how all of stoicism worked.

But even though stoicism is the like fashionable ancient philosophy right now, the one that

we actually all believe in on some deep cultural level, even if we don't believe in it consciously,

is epicureanism.

We're all kind of epicureans, or we're all tempted to epicureanism, even if we don't

know it.

And the reason we don't know it is because unlike the word stoic, which actually means something

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