I Bought a Candle I Didn't Need and Epicurus Called Me Out From 300 BC

So here's a dumb thing that happened to me. Well, not to me exactly, this is a "you" thing, a general human thing, but let's be honest, it happens to basically everyone, myself very much included.

You have a bad day. Not a tragic day, just a grating one. Traffic, an annoying email, someone at work being weird with you for no clear reason. And by 8pm you're on your phone, and somehow you end up buying a candle. Or a shirt. Or one of those little kitchen gadgets that promises to change your life and will, in reality, live in a drawer for four years before you throw it away without ever opening the box.

You feel good for like twenty minutes. Genuinely good. Then it fades. Not dramatically, just... fades. And the weird part is you don't even fully register that it faded, you just move on to the next thing.

This isn't really about shopping. Stay with me.

There's a Greek guy, Epicurus, who a lot of people think was some kind of "eat drink and be merry" party philosopher because his name got attached to the word "epicurean," which now basically means fancy food and wine culture. This is, and I cannot stress this enough, almost the opposite of what he actually believed.

Epicurus ran a school outside Athens sometime around 300 BC. His whole philosophy was built around one question: what actually makes a human being happy, in a way that lasts, as opposed to the fake stuff that feels like happiness for about a minute and then leaves you hungrier than before.

And he split desires into categories. This part is genuinely useful, I think about it more than I'd like to admit.

First category: natural and necessary desires. Food, water, shelter, sleep, basic safety, some kind of friendship or community. These are the desires that, once satisfied, actually leave you alone. You eat when you're hungry, you're not hungry anymore, done, moving on with your life.

Second category: natural but unnecessary. Wanting good food, not just food. Wanting a nice house, not just shelter. These aren't bad, Epicurus wasn't a monk about it, but he flagged them as a bit trickier because they can expand. You can always want a slightly nicer version of the thing you already have.

Third category: and this is the one that got me: vain and empty desires. Wealth beyond what you need, status, fame, power, luxury for the sake of being seen having luxury. He said these desires are, and I'm paraphrasing here because I don't have the Greek memorized, basically bottomless. There's no natural stopping point. You can always want more status. There's no biological signal that goes "okay that's enough status now," the way there's a signal that goes "okay that's enough water now."

The candle is a vain and empty desire wearing a disguise. It's dressed up as self-care, as a treat, as something reasonable and small. But the actual mechanism behind it, the thing that made you open the app at 8pm, wasn't "I require this candle to live." It was something closer to wanting to feel like a person who has nice things, who takes care of herself, who deserves something after a hard day. Which, fine, you do deserve something. But the candle isn't going to deliver whatever it is you actually need, because what you need isn't a candle-shaped problem.

This is where it gets a little uncomfortable, not gonna lie.

Epicurus thought most human misery comes from chasing category three desires while mistaking them for category one. You think you need the promotion, the bigger apartment, the recognition, the thing everyone's impressed by, and your brain files it under "necessary for survival" even though, obviously, it isn't. Nobody has ever died from not getting a promotion. But it doesn't feel that way at 11pm when you're lying there running numbers on whether you're behind in life.

He also had this idea that's stuck with me for years, about how pleasure works. He said the greatest pleasure isn't intensity, it's the absence of disturbance. Ataraxia, he called it. Untroubledness, roughly. Not a peak experience. Just... nothing bothering you. Which sounds boring as hell until you actually sit with it, and realize that's kind of the whole thing everyone's chasing without knowing it. Nobody actually wants the rollercoaster of buying stuff and feeling great then flat then buying more stuff. They want to just feel okay. Steadily. Without needing the next hit to get there.

The candle promises intensity. A little spike. Epicurus is over here saying, quietly, from 2300 years ago, that spikes aren't the goal, and chasing them is actually what keeps you from ever landing on the steady okay-ness you're actually after.

I want to be clear, he wasn't anti-pleasure. This is the misconception that ruined his reputation for centuries, largely thanks to people who didn't like him and decided to just call him a glutton in their writings, which then became the accepted story for like 1500 years, which is a wild example of how a smear campaign can just outlive everyone involved and become "history." He liked good food. He liked wine. He had a whole community of friends living together, gardening, talking philosophy, eating simple meals. He just thought the fanciest, most extravagant version of pleasure usually costs you more peace than it gives you back, and that a life spent chasing category three stuff is basically a life spent running on a treadmill that's been tilted slightly uphill, forever.

So, the candle.

Not evil. Not a moral failing. I'm not saying never buy candles, I would be a massive hypocrite, my apartment currently has four unlit candles doing absolutely nothing for me.

What I'm saying, and what I think Epicurus would say if he somehow ended up on your phone's shopping app at 8pm watching you add things to a cart, is just: notice which category this is coming from. Ask if the thing you're buying is solving a real problem (cold, hungry, actually out of something) or if it's trying to patch over a feeling that has nothing to do with the object at all.

Because here's the actual kicker, the thing that gets me every time I think about it: the feeling doesn't go away when you buy the thing. It just gets postponed. You feel a little better for twenty minutes because you did something, anything, and doing something feels like control. But whatever produced the bad day is still there tomorrow. The email's still annoying. The person at work is still weird. The candle's just sitting there, lit, doing its very best, completely unequipped to deal with any of it.

Epicurus thought the fix for this wasn't more stuff, obviously, but also wasn't some extreme self-denial thing either. It was mostly just... friendship, actually. He talked about friendship constantly, more than almost anything else, as one of the only things that reliably makes life better without any weird diminishing returns attached to it. You don't get sick of a good friend the way you get sick of a candle. A good conversation doesn't end up in a drawer.

Which is sort of a plain, undramatic answer to a very modern, very dramatic problem. No one's writing a catchy headline that says "ancient philosopher recommends texting a friend instead of buying things," but that's basically it. That's the whole scroll.

Anyway. I'm not saying return the candle. Light it. It's fine. Just maybe notice, next time, what you're actually reaching for when you reach for your phone at 8pm, and whether the thing in the cart has any real chance of touching it.

It probably doesn't. Epicurus knew that in 300 BC. We're all still figuring it out one impulse buy at a time.