“1. “That which is happy and imperishable, neither has trouble itself, nor does it cause it to anything; so that it is not subject to the feelings of either anger or gratitude; for these feelings only exist in what is weak. [...] 2. “Death is nothing to us; for that which is dissolved is devoid of sensation, and that which is devoid of sensation is nothing to us. 3. “The limit of the greatness of the pleasures is the removal of everything which can give pain. And where pleasure is, as long as it lasts, that which gives pain, or that which feels pain, or both of them, are absent. 4. “Pain does not abide continuously in the flesh, but in its extremity it is present only a very short time. That pain which only just exceeds the pleasure in the flesh, does not last many days. But long diseases have in them more that is pleasant than painful to the flesh.” — Diogenes Laertius, *Lives of Eminent Philosophers*, Book X, Sec. XXXI, Maxims 1–4, trans. C. D. Yonge (1853). **Surface Gloss:** Perfected beings neither feel anger nor grant favors; death is non-experience; maximum pleasure is simply the complete absence of pain; and bodily pain is either brief in its extremity or mild in its duration. The **Zero-State Ceiling**: most human misery comes from treating satisfaction as an open-ended vertical ladder when it is actually a binary pressure-valve. Once structural deficit (pain, hunger, acute threat) is removed, you are already at 100% baseline capacity. Everything beyond that zero-deficit mark is merely horizontal flavor-swapping ("diversification"), not an increase in well-being. Stop paying exponential effort costs for horizontal variety under the delusion that it raises your vertical ceiling.
— In our words · Source: Lives of Eminent Philosophers (Diogenes Laertius)