The Philosopy of Pinkie Pie. A modern Epicurus.

Throughout the TV series, movies and comic books, Pinkie Pie (both Pony and Human versions of her) have shown proficiency and talents at many tasks. In fact, Pinkie Pie seems to have the skills and potential to be the greatest at any task or endeavor she would ever want to take.

In one of the early comic issues, we see that Human Pinkie Pie did try outs for every single club at Canterlot High and was so good that each and every one of them wanted her to join AND be their most important member. imgur.com/a/Jm7cN Pony Pinkie Pie has ran as fast as Rainbow Dash can fly, can play any musical instrument, or all of them at once, has knowledge of creatures that not even Twilight knows (like the Parasprites), the list could go on forever.

So, the question is, why isn’t Pinkie Pie, either of them, interested in using her hidden potential to its maximum? Why isn’t she inventing new things, discovering new things, etc? Instead of any of this things, Pinkie Pie in any of her versions, seems to seek only one thing: having fun, being happy, and making everyone else around her have fun and be happy as well.

Thought history, philosophers have tried to answer several questions, like what “is” and what “is not”, what does it mean to be “good” or “evil”, and other questions regarding the meaning of life and the universe. But then we have Epicurus, a greek philosopher from 341 B.C.

Unlike other philosophers, Epicurus didn’t focus his philosophy on existentialisms, or good and evil, he focused on what was fun, on what made a person be happy. A question that he spent all his life trying to answer as good as possible.
Unfortunately, even back then the world was a bitter place always trying to bring people down, and when people heard that Epicurus had set up a SCHOOL to study happiness, there were all kind of rumors about it.

Some rumors said that the school would have orgies every night, or feasts where people would eat until they were full and even more, or both. One of his critics even said that Epicurus had orgasmed 18 times in a single night in a room full of virgins. Of course, none of this things were true.

Epicurus, and the rest of the staff in his school of happiness, were indeed studying happiness, but were very serious about it. Epicurus only owned two pieces of clothing, and would eat only bread, olives and an occasional slice of cheese every now and then. As for his sexual habits, he usually answered that philosophy was his only love.

Having patiently studied happiness for several years, Epicurus finally came to a conclusion of what exactly a person needs in order to be happy. He first concluded that everyone usually made three mistakes when thinking about happiness.

First, people usually think that being happy means having a romantic, sexual relationship. But Epicurus only had to look around to notice that there were many unhappy couples, who had their unions tainted by jealously, misunderstanding, cheating and bitterness. At the same time, he noticed how much nicer friendships are, how people tended to be so decent and unpossessive with their friends. Friendship, he concluded, was where human nature was at its sweetest. The only problem with that, according to Epicurus, was that we don’t hang out with our friends enough.

The second thing that people usually think is that happiness means having a lot of money. But, again, Epicurus noticed the big flaw here: that people tend to miscalculate the tremendous amounts of sacrifices we need to do in order to obtain said money. To get money we have to endure a lot of jealously, backstabbing, long hours of hard working effort, and so on. Epicurus concluded that what made work really satisfying wasn’t money, but it was when we were able to work alone, or in small groups, like a bakery, or a repair shop (ancient Greece had plenty of repair shops for merchant ships, for example), and also when we feel that our work is truly helping others, and in our own, small way, making the world a better, happier, place. Deep down we don’t really desire wealth or status, what we desire is feeling like we are making a difference.

And third, Epicurus saw how people seemed to be obsessed with luxury and having a lot of things, especially houses in great locations, the bigger and better looking the better. But beneath our desire for luxury, what we really want is to be calm, we want our minds pure and free, free of all the bother and chaos of the rest of the world. So, did luxury actually make us calm? Epicurus wasn’t convinced about that. And so, his studies on happiness concluded that a person only needed three things to be happy.

First, you needed to have your friends around you. No sex, no orgies, just your buddies, and not only seeing them every now and then, it had to be regular contact. So Epicurus purchased one big house and moved in with all of his friends. Everyone had their own bedrooms, but there were also big shared areas, like the kitchen, there was always someone nice that you could talk to.

Second, everyone started to take it easy or take it down a couple of gears, or however you want to call it. They stopped working for someone else, they took big paycuts so they could have more time to do their own things, some took up farming, some took up cooking, or crafting, or writing.

And third, Epicurus stopped thinking one could be calm just by having a beautiful scenery around you, and focused on trying to find calmness in their own minds, spending some time by themselves, reflecting on things, writing things down, reading, meditating about things.

Epicurus little experiment was so successful and the members of his little commune were so happy, that his ideas spread like fire. Communities just like the one Epicurus had formed started to appear all around the world (which, back then, was basically all the land around the Mediterranean sea). At the height of the movement, there was an estimate of 400 thousand people living in communes from modern day Spain to Lebanon.

This movement was actually ended by the Christian church in the 5th century, but they must have had some respect for said communities, because all of them were converted into monasteries. In fact, what we today know as monasteries were really “Epicurian” communes, with a Christian topping. Another little tidbit is that Karl Marx did his college thesis on Epicurus, and what we call Communism, is actually just an unsuccessful, and corrupt, version of Epicurus’ ideas.

The real legacy of Epicurus is that people aren’t very good at making themselves happy, mostly because we believe that being happy its easy, we all believe happiness is having lots of sex, lots of money, lots of luxury, and all we have to do is find a way to secure all of this things.

Epicurus says no to all that, and ask that we reflect in the moments that really made you happy, and they have nothing to do with these things, and to have the courage to change one’s life in accordance to the moments that actually gave us satisfaction, this means that you might end up living in a very different way, in a very different place, with just a couple of cloaks, some cake, some nice books, and all your friends.

This is basically how Pinkie Pie lives her life, she doesn’t seek to use her talents to become rich and famous. All she cares about is being with her friends, be it baking a cake, having a party, playing games, or anything else they might want to do together. Sure, she could become the best whatever in the world, with customers and/or fans coming from far and wide, willing to pay her a lot of money for whatever it is she does. But she just doesn’t want that, because she’s not after money, wealth or fame, she wants to play music with her friends, not be on tour all over the world and be rich and famous. She wants to make cupcakes for her friends and eat them together, she doesn’t want to have a five star restaurant with thousands of clients and her own reality cook show. She’s not even seeking a romantic relationship, all she is looking for is more friends, to have more fun moments.

Pinkie Pie is, basically, the best student Epicurus could ever hope to have. A pony (or person) that simply understood that what she wanted from life was to be happy, and understood what she really had to do in order to be happy.