Frustration is the emotional feeling that occurs whenever a person is prevented or does not achieve their desires. When humans do not reach the set targets, they may succumb to frustrations or feel angry and irritable. The most ultimate source of human frustrations can either be external or internal. Internal sources of frustrations revolve around the disappointments of not achieving our desires due to personal imagined or actual deficiencies such as fear of social situations or deficits (Bergsma, 2008). Internal frustration can also occur due to personal competing goals that interfere with one another.
The second source of frustrations in human life comes from the external world. It involves external conditions like physical roadblocks encountered in life, including things that get in the way of their goals and other people they face in their lifespan. The primary source of human frustrations today is associated with the perception of time wastage. When in traffic, standing in the bank line, or when on the phone, and the day is going by, that is the most significant source of frustration. However, this kind of frustrations coming from the external world are unavoidable. People may try to use alternative routes to escape the situation, but eventually, they realize there is nothing they can do about it, and it is just a way of life. According to Epicureanism, desires are the highest source of human misery.
If people do not get what they want in life, they get a desire frustration. According to Otto Rank (Ridgway, 2018) frustration is a crucial concept for both clinical and academic psychology. It is not something that will occur often, and it should not be seen as a sign of misfortune. Every person is subjected to frustrations in the course of their life, and therefore it is bound to occur as long as someone is living. According to Epicureanism, rejecting determinism and embracing hedonism is the ultimate solution to human frustrations and misery. The lack of pain in the body and lack of disturbances in the soul, which Epicurus calls tranquility of mind, is the ultimate happiness and solution to human frustrations. In his view, Epicurus advocates that the chief good is decreasing pain and increasing pleasure (Bergsma, 2008). He supports the need for deferring gratification and living a contemplative and modest life amongst friendly communities (Rossi, 2017). Epicureanism offers valuable guidelines and describes the condition for happiness to deal with challenging emotional content and hardships. The philosophy’s ideas of avoiding frustrations are the absence of pain. It assumes that happiness comes when one is in the right state of mind and has no need to seek active interactions with the environment in the urge for better life circumstances.
Although Epicureanism is accurate when addressing human frustrations, the advice cannot fit the present-day times. It could be a good option for the contemporaries of Epicurus time due to the hardships they were undergoing. In addition, Epicureanism does not give a specific direction that people can follow to find happiness which is the ultimate solution to human frustrations (Rossi, 2017). Though the central aim of his philosophy is finding a cure for unnecessary frustrations that comes out of unfulfilled desire, his recommendations cannot apply in modern society. However, his advice shares some characteristics with modern day therapy that aims to kill counterproductive thinking patterns and replace them with hopeful and realistic ones.
References
Bergsma, A., Poot, G., & Liefbroer, A. C. (2008). Happiness in the garden of Epicurus.Journal of happiness studies, 9(3), 397-423. Web.
Rossi, B. (2017). Squaring the Epicurean Circle: Friendship and Happiness in the Garden. Ancient Philosophy, 37(1), 153-168. Web.
Ridgway, R., House, S. H., Findeisen, B., & Crawford, M. A. (2018). Recalling past distress and releasing it. In The Unborn Child (pp. 66-76). Routledge.