You open your phone: someone posted the keys to their new home, someone is on vacation, someone got a promotion. You put the phone down; the coffee is the same, the home is the same, but everything looks a little smaller. Epicurus, who lived twenty-three centuries ago in a small garden outside Athens on bread, water and a little cheese, knew how to turn this quiet thief away at the door. In this conversation we talk about comparing yourself with others, measuring your life against the shop windows of social media, envy, and the peace that contentment brings.

📖 Sources in the video:
• Epicurus, Vatican Sayings 35 (common translation): "Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for."
• Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus: natural and necessary, natural but unnecessary, and empty desires; pleasure not as a feast but as freedom from pain and peace of mind.
• The words over the Garden's gate ("Stranger, here you will do well to tarry; here our highest good is pleasure.") are a tradition reported in Seneca's Letters to Lucilius (21).
• A saying from our culture: "Contentment is an endless treasure."

💬 Whose shop window did you last look at and feel your own life was small? Which of the things you have today was once only a dream? Share in the comments; no one is judged here.

May contentment fill your heart, my dear friend.