³⁷Even Socrates is claimed to have said that “You seem (...) to imagine that happiness consists in luxury and extravagance. But my belief is that to have no wants is divine; to have as few as possible comes next to the divine” (Xenophon, Memorabilia 1.6.10, trans. E. C. Marchant). Other schools of Hellenistic philosophy had a very similar attitude. According to Long (2006, p. 13), a Pyrrhonian (Skeptic) will not “decline or choose” since desire is “the first of all bad things”. Reducing desires was recommended even by Epicurus, who seems to have been seriously misunderstood (Seneca describes in On a Happy Life, XIII how Epicurus was misunderstood already in ancient Rome). Epicurus proposed that there are a few desires which need to be satisfied since they are both natural and necessary: Food, water, and shelter; these desires are also easy to satisfy. In contrast, desire for money, power, fame etc. are unnatural and unnecessary; they are also insatiable. Optimal “pleasure” is obtained by rejecting desires which are not natural and necessary. See Epicurus’s Letter to Menoeceus, or Hadot (2002, p.34); Konstan (2018). Likewise, Seneca’s Letters to Lucilius, 21.7-8 proposes that the best way to increase pleasures is to reduce desires, while Letters to Lucilius, 16.7-9 considers the insatiability/satiability (or satisfiability) distinction in more detail. Irvine (2005) provides a modern account of the Stoic position.