The Epicurean Happiness Toolkit helps you manage pleasure. Its four steps help you foster good results in the good intent-good results recipe for ethical decision making.
In TST Philosophy, the Epicurean Happiness Toolkit helps you manage pleasure as part of your personal morality and overall happiness. It is a common floor for managing pleasure under wisdom and a hook into Epicurean thought.
TST moves pleasure away from being the only goal of life and into a pleasure-management system. You manage your own pleasure to support your Stoic character building, and both are aimed at the larger goal of flourishing for all. With the two types of pleasures, the toolkit teaches you to prefer long-term pleasures over short-term ones. To aid in this effort, you start by understanding the nature of the three categories of desire: natural, unnatural, and vain. Through this lens, you learn to treat happiness as something cultivated through wisdom, simplicity, friendship, tranquility, and freedom from unnecessary fear. The Four-Part Remedy, or Tetrapharmakos aids in the effort to free you from unnecessary fear.
Managing pleasure includes the idea that simple pleasures are not the only pleasures worth cultivating. They are the launchpad. Just as TST uses four core virtues to begin training character, it uses the Epicurean Happiness Toolkit to begin training pleasure under wisdom. Friendship helps anchor happiness in real relationships. Tranquility helps protect peace of mind. Freedom from unnecessary fear helps loosen the grip of anxiety, superstition, and imagined threats. Together, they give TST Ethics a practical happiness backbone.
