The Socrates Express

6. How to Enjoy like Epicurus

7:35 p.m. Somewhere in Montana. On board Amtrak’s Empire Builder, en route from Chicago to Portland, Oregon.

We travel to escape the tyranny of habit. We humans, though, are lost without structure and, after two days on board Amtrak, I’m craving just that. I read, and I think. I read about thinking and I think about reading. I rearrange my roomette, moving luggage from nook to cranny then back to nook again. For hours I position myself at the stern of the train and, peering out a small window, watch the world retreat, like a movie that’s perpetually ending but never does. Mostly, I wait for a chirpy Amtrak voice, Miss Oliver, beckoning me to the dining car.

Nothing says structure like food. Meals are the girders that hold the day upright. Without them, time collapses onto itself and gravity increases exponentially, like in a black hole. This is a scientific fact.

Dining while stationary is pleasurable enough, but my enjoyment increases exponentially when in motion. There is something wonderfully decadent about the combination of dining and moving. At least there once was.

In 1868, George Pullman inaugurated the first dining car. He named it the Delmonico, after the famous New York restaurant. Fine dining had taken to the rails.

The menu, printed on silk, offered dozens of choices, including oysters and Welsh rarebit. All served on fine china, naturally, and complemented with a bottle of Chateau Margaux or perhaps a sparkling Krug.

A New York Times correspondent wrote breathlessly of his 1869 journey on board a Pullman from Omaha to San Francisco. He adored the antelope steak (“The gourmet who has not experienced this—bah! What does he know of the feast of fat things?”) and swooned over the mountain brook trout (cooked in a sauce “piquante and unpurchaseable”). All served, he notes, on “tables covered with snowy linen.”

I consider my Amtrak food and regret having missed the golden age of railway dining by a good century. My linen is not snowy. My china is not fine. There are no bumpers of sparkling Krug, though, to be fair, my Diet Coke does fizz a bit. My entrée—allegedly seared shrimp over rice pilaf—does not make me swoon. It is edible, yes, but not gourmet.

All philosophers, like all teenagers, are misunderstood. It comes with the territory. None is more misconstrued, more unjustly maligned, than the great philosopher of pleasure, Epicurus.

Born in 341 BC, on the island of Samos, Epicurus turned to philosophy at a young age, and for the usual reasons: an abundance of questions and a deep suspicion of the answers adults gave him. He studied the greats—Heraclitus and Democritus in particular. Soon he amassed his own students, drawn to his charming and accessible teaching style. He often used colorful, shocking language. Like Socrates, Epicurus was a practitioner of Crazy Wisdom. People needed to be shaken out of their trance, and by any means necessary.

Epicurus hopped around the Greek world, living briefly in Colophon (now Turkey) and on the island of Lesbos, before settling in Athens, at the age of thirty-five. There he purchased a house outside the city walls. Encircled by a large wall, it contained a lush garden. The perfect place, he thought, to found a school, and a community. Instantly popular, it eventually became known simply as Kepos. The Garden.

Gardens and philosophy go together well. Voltaire, the darling of the French Enlightenment, said “we must cultivate our garden.” The seventeenth-century English writer and gardener John Evelyn agreed, adding that the “air and genius of gardens” lend themselves to “philosophical Enthusiasms.”

I love that phrase. The world needs more philosophical enthusiasts. Not students of philosophy, and God knows not experts, but enthusiasts, with all of the unabashed gusto the word implies. Gardens, sequestered from the noise of the world, lend themselves to such philosophical enthusiasms.

Gardens require tending. So do our thoughts. Someone who thinks is not a philosopher any more than someone who putters about in his backyard is a gardener. Both pursuits—gardening and philosophy—require an adult’s disciplined commitment combined with a child’s easy joy.

Both pursuits represent an attempt to create, not impose, order out of chaos while retaining a hint of wildness, à la Thoreau, and a dash of mystery, too. The gardener collaborates with nature. Dresses it up, as Voltaire said. The gardener does her bit, planting and shoveling and weeding but, ultimately, the fate of her garden lies elsewhere. It rests with the natural processes—and, yes, the magic—that unfolds within the garden walls. Philosophy contains its own magic, provided you do the hard work.

Places matter. They are repositories of ideas. That’s why I travel, and why I am here now, in Athens, searching for traces of Epicurus and his garden. It won’t be easy. Archaeologists, with all the tools and smarts at their disposal, have yet to pinpoint its precise location. Yet this does not dampen my philosophical enthusiasm. You needn’t know what you’re looking for in order to find it. Gumption is the best navigator.

After a few wrong turns, I find my first landmark: the Dipylon, or Double Gate. Once the main entrance to Athens, it was the largest gate of the ancient world. The centuries have shrunk the gate to a low stone wall—not unlike, I imagine, the one in Philadelphia where Jacob Needleman and Elias sat and experienced questions.

In olden times, a city’s walls demarcated two worlds. To step outside the city walls was to make a statement, and to take a chance, as Rousseau knew so well. Today, the neighborhood outside the Double Gate occupies a netherworld: that fleeting interval between the formerly sketchy and the currently unaffordable. Auto repair shops abut trendy cafés. I stop and listen, as Schopenhauer would. A rhythmic banging emanates from the auto shops, pop music from the cafés. Laughter, too. People seeking pleasure, just as they did in Epicurus’s time, and long before.

I pause at a small clearing between two not-yet-hip concrete buildings. I notice a few scrappy plants sprouting from the concrete. Not a garden, exactly, but close enough. I try to imagine the scene some 2,500 years ago.

The streets back then were crowded. I can picture a young woman among the throng. Her name is Themista, the history books tell us. As a woman, life is difficult even in the best of times. And these are not the best of times. Nothing seems certain anymore. Alexander’s death upended the world. The old order has collapsed and a new one has yet to take its place.

I can picture Themista venturing outside the city gates, taking a chance, when she spots a walled compound. On one side is an odd inscription: “Stranger, your time will be pleasant here. Here the highest good is pleasure.”

Themista is intrigued. This sounds much more inviting than Plato’s Academy, not far from here. There a more foreboding sign greets visitors: “Let no one ignorant of geometry enter here.” She steps across the threshold and finds not only a garden but a small farm, and a welcoming atmosphere.

Epicurus’s choice of a walled garden, in a relatively remote location, was no accident. In a sharp break with the Stoics and other philosophical schools, he urged his followers to avoid “the prison of business affairs and politics.” Political bonds, Epicurus thought, reduced your self-sufficiency, and amounted to outsourcing your happiness. His motto was Lathe Biosas. “Live in obscurity.” Such reclusiveness was as controversial then as it is today. Those who withdraw from the world are always suspect. We mock the recluse to the extent we feel threatened by him.

Epicurus broke with tradition in other ways, too. While most schools accepted only male citizens of Athens, Epicurus welcomed freed slaves and women, like Themista, to whom he dedicated several works.

Not surprisingly, a walled-off community that welcomed people not normally welcome and advocated a life devoted to pleasure raised suspicions. Rumors of orgies and lavish feasts circulated. Epicurus, it was said, vomited twice a day due to overindulgence and “for many years he was unable to get out of his sedan chair.”

The rumors were unfounded. The Garden resembled a monastery more than a brothel. Life was communal, with little privacy. “Let nothing be done in your life, which will cause you fear if it becomes known to your neighbor,” said Epicurus. Few of his followers seemed to mind that prohibition. They had nothing to hide.

Like others I’ve encountered on my journey, Epicurus was a philosopher of the body as well as the mind. The body, he believed, contains the greatest wisdom.

Epicurus was an Empiricist. We know the world, he believed, through our senses and only our senses. The senses may not be perfect, but no other reliable source of knowledge exists, and anyone who tells you otherwise is either deluded or selling something.

Epicurus honed his own senses. He was a keen observer of human behavior. He surveyed Athens, and everywhere he saw people who had enough: enough food, enough money, and certainly enough culture. Why weren’t they happy?

Epicurus approached this mystery like a physician treating a patient with unexplained symptoms. Philosophy, he said, should be dispensed like medicine for the soul. The first four of his Principal Doctrines are known as the tetrapharmakos, the “Four-Part Cure.” Like medicine, philosophy must be ingested at regular intervals, and at prescribed dosages. Like medicine, there are potential side effects: dizziness, disorientation, and, occasionally, manic episodes.

The medical approach was no accident. Epicurus lived during the peak of therapeutic philosophy. During the time, an era known as the Hellenistic Age, people chose a school of philosophy with the same ardent deliberation people today choose a spouse or a wireless plan. The stakes were high. You weren’t making an academic choice, Princeton over Stanford. You were making a life choice that would shape your character, and therefore your destiny.

The schools were combination university, health club, self-help seminar, and, in the case of Epicurus, hippie commune. Teachers focused on ethics. Derived from the Greek word for “character,” ethics was the study of the good life: eudaimonia. Some philosophers thought only the gods and the blessed few could achieve this elevated state of happiness. Epicurus thought anyone could. Meditate on these teachings “night and day,” he told his students, and you will “live like a god among men.”

Examining the sickly body politic of Athens, Epicurus posited a simple diagnosis: we fear what is not harmful and desire what is not necessary. What do we fear the most? he asked. The gods and death. (Presumably taxes were not a major stressor in ancient times.) He had answers for both. The gods, he said, exist but couldn’t care less about human affairs. Why should they? They’re too busy being gods. For Epicurus, the gods were like celebrities. They lead enviable lives, free of worries, always able to get a reservation.

As for death, Epicurus tells us to relax. Yes, dying can be painful, Epicurus acknowledges, but such pain is self-limiting. It won’t last forever. Either it subsides, or you die. Either way, there’s nothing to fear.

I find this idea, like much of Epicurus’s philosophy, sound in theory but problematic in practice. I don’t fear the gods, but the prospect of nonexistence freaks me out. I suspect it always will.

Relax, says Epicurus, and enjoy. He advocated pleasure as “the beginning and the end of the happy life,” adding provocatively: “I do not know how I shall conceive of the good if I take away the pleasure of taste, if I take away sexual pleasure, if I take away the pleasure of hearing, and if I take away the sweet emotions that are caused by the sight of a beautiful form.”

No wonder Epicurus was so maligned. Pleasure is suspect. It resides in the shadows, behind closed doors. When we speak of “secret” or “hidden” pleasures, we’re acknowledging the shame attached to this most basic of human instincts.

Epicurus thought otherwise. He considered pleasure the highest good. Everything else—fame, money, and even virtue—mattered only to the extent they furthered pleasure. “I spit upon the honorable and those who vainly admire it,” he wrote, in his typically provocative style. Pleasure is the only thing we desire for its own sake. Everything else, even philosophy, is a means to that one end.

The primacy of pleasure, Epicurus said, was self-evident. What does a child respond to? Pleasure and pain. You don’t need to teach her that fire is hot and candy tasty; she knows it. Seeking pleasure and avoiding pain is as natural, and automatic, as breathing.

Epicurus defined pleasure differently from the way most of us do. We think of pleasure as a presence, what psychologists call positive affect. Epicurus defined pleasure as a lack, an absence. The Greeks called this state ataraxia, literally “lack of disturbance.” It is the absence of anxiety rather than the presence of anything that leads to contentment. Pleasure is not the opposite of pain but its absence. Epicurus was no hedonist. He was a “tranquillist.”

Some psychologists take exception with Epicurus’s focus almost exclusively on pain relief. “Happiness is definitely something other than the mere absence of all pain,” sniffs the Journal of Happiness Studies. Before reading Epicurus, I would have agreed. Now I’m not so sure. If I’m honest with myself, I recognize that what I crave most is not fame or wealth but peace of mind, the “pure pleasure of existing.” It’s nearly impossible to describe such a state in terms other than that of absence.

Avoiding pain is sound advice—I’m all for it—but isn’t it an awfully thin basis for a philosophy? Not if you’re in pain, Epicurus thought. Imagine you’ve fallen from a horse and broken your leg. A doctor is summoned and promptly offers you a bowl of grapes. What’s wrong? The grapes are pleasurable, aren’t they?

This absurd situation is the one many of us find ourselves in, Epicurus believed. We scoop trivial pleasures atop a mountain of pain, and wonder why we’re not happy. Some of us suffer the sharp shock of physical pain, others the dull ache of mental pain or the I want-to-die pain of a broken heart, but pain is pain, and we must address it if we hope to achieve contentment. “We are only born once—twice is not allowed,” he said. Every human life, Epicurus believed, is the fortuitous product of chance, a swerve in atomic motion, a miracle of sorts. Shouldn’t we celebrate that?

I decamp from the site of what may or may not have been the Garden, and retreat behind the walls of an inviting café. I order a Mythos beer and contemplate the many pleasures of Epicurus. He didn’t merely celebrate pleasure. He dissected it, developing an entire taxonomy of desire.

At the top of the ladder were the “natural and necessary” desires. A glass of water, for instance, after a trek through the desert. Next came “natural but not necessary” desires. A glass of simple table wine after drinking the water after trekking across the desert. Finally, at the bottom of the pyramid, are desires that are neither natural nor necessary, what Epicurus calls “empty” desires. A pricey bottle of champagne after imbibing the table wine after drinking the water after trekking across the desert. These empty desires cause the most suffering, Epicurus thought, since they are difficult to obtain. “It is better for you to lie upon a bed of straw and be free of fear, than to have a golden couch and an opulent table, yet be troubled in mind.”

I sip my beer—natural but not necessary—and take silent inventory of my various desires. I don’t like what I find. I devote energy—too much, I know—chasing mirages. I devote a lot of energy to bags. I love bags (satchels, mainly, but also backpacks and briefcases) and, like all loves, this one consumes me. Epicurus would take one look at my outsize bag collection (I have a problem) and declare it, at best, a natural but not necessary desire. Yes, we need something to carry our stuff, but we don’t need fifty-four bags of various vintages and leather-and-canvas configurations. A simple rucksack will do.

Not only are there different kinds of pleasures, Epicurus says, but they operate at different speeds. Here he differentiates between static and kinetic pleasures. The act of slaking our thirst with a glass of chilled water is a kinetic pleasure. The sated feeling—the lack of thirst—we experience afterward is a static pleasure. Or, put another way, drinking is a kinetic pleasure, having drunk a static one.

We typically think of kinetic pleasures as the most satisfying, but Epicurus didn’t see it that way. Static pleasures are superior, for we seek them for their own sake. They are ends, not means. “I find full pleasure in the body when I live on bread and water,” said Epicurus, “and I spit upon the pleasures of plush living not for their own account, but because of the discomforts that follow them.”

What exactly are the discomforts that follow, say, a five-course meal at the French Laundry? Epicurus is speaking of physical sensations—indigestion, a hangover—but mostly about another, insidious kind of pain: the pain of not-having. You enjoyed the Pacific Wild King Salmon Terrine—the pleasure was real—but now it is gone and you crave it again. You have outsourced your happiness to the Salmon Terrine—and to the fisherman who caught it, the restaurant that serves it, the boss who cuts your paycheck so you can afford it. You are now a Salmon Terrine junkie, your happiness dependent on regular hits of the stuff. All because you have mistaken an unnecessary desire for a necessary one.

Take heart, says Epicurus. Nature has you covered. She has made the necessary desires easy to obtain and the unnecessary ones difficult. Apples grow on trees. Teslas don’t. Desire is nature’s GPS, guiding us toward the highest pleasures and away from the empty ones.

We are supposedly living in a golden age of pleasure. So many tantalizing options lie only a click away: gourmet food, memory-foam mattresses, kinky sex, gadgets galore. Pleasure decoys, all of them, Epicurus would say. Like any good decoy, they look real, and so we take aim. If we fail to hit the target, we blame ourselves for poor marksmanship and reload.

Stop aiming at decoys, counsels Epicurus. Better yet, stop shooting altogether. “Not what we have but what we enjoy constitutes our abundance,” he says, noting that, with the right mind-set, even a small pot of cheese can convert a simple meal into a lavish feast.

Beyond a certain point, Epicurus believed, pleasure cannot be increased—just as a bright sky cannot get any brighter—but only varied. That new pair of shoes or smart watch represents pleasure varied, not increased. Yet our entire consumer culture is predicated on the assumption that pleasure varied equals pleasure increased. This faulty equation causes needless suffering.

Not only does the variety of pleasure matter less than we think, so does its duration. A twenty-minute massage isn’t necessarily twice as pleasurable as a ten-minute one. You cannot double tranquility. You’re either at peace or you are not.

This philosophy may not sound like much fun, but it was. The Epicureans, ensconced behind the garden walls, lived a simple life but one punctuated by lavish feasts. They knew that luxury is best enjoyed intermittently, and welcomed whatever goodness came their way. Epicureanism is a philosophy of acceptance, and its close cousin, gratitude. When we accept something, truly accept it, we can’t help but feel gratitude.

I recently met a young psychologist named Rob, who, I think, embodies the Epicurean ethos, even if he doesn’t know it. Rob and I spent three days hiking in the otherworldly wilderness that is southern Utah as part of an experiment into the health benefits of nature. (I was the guinea pig.)

One day, I noticed Rob’s water bottle, sleek and ergonomic, eliciting in me a nearly baglike thrill.

“Where did you buy it?” I asked Rob.

“I didn’t buy it,” he replied. “It happened at me.”

A lot happens at Rob. Not only water bottles but coffee mugs, flashlights, and other items. After our expedition, Rob and I exchanged emails, and he informed me: “A new coffee mug happened at me about an hour ago as I crossed campus; it is fairly fancy and came, for some unfathomable reason, in its own box. I have placed it in my office along with five other mugs, eight water bottles, a protein shaker, and two headlamps, all of which also happened at me. If this doesn’t abate soon, I’ll be able to retire early and just open up a gift shop.”

Rob’s attitude is pure Epicurus. If goodness comes your way, enjoy it. Don’t seek it. Good things come to those who don’t expect good things to come to them. Rob doesn’t expend energy hunting for these baubles. They simply happen at him. When they do, he is grateful.

In the centuries that followed Epicurus’s death, Epicurean gardens sprang up across the Mediterranean. They attracted large and devoted followings and, unlike other schools, had low attrition rates. Many entered the garden; few fled.

Those outside the garden walls threw stones. The Stoic teacher Epictetus called Epicurus a “foul-mouthed bastard.” Epicureanism, with its ethos of principled pleasure, threatened other schools of philosophy, and especially a popular new religion: Christianity. Eventually, the Church prevailed. For many centuries, Epicureanism all but disappeared.

Then, in 1417, an intrepid scholar named Poggio Bracciolini, scouring southern Europe for lost treasures from antiquity, discovered the single remaining copy of On the Nature of Things, an Epicurean treatise by the Roman poet Lucretius. In 1473, it became one of the first books printed on the newly invented mechanical press.

Epicurus’s ideas—about pleasure and simplicity and the good life—found a receptive new audience, from France to the American colonies. In 1819, a retired Thomas Jefferson declared, “I too am an Epicurean.” In a letter to a friend, he expands. “I consider the genuine (not the imputed) doctrines of Epicurus as containing everything rational in moral philosophy which Greece & Rome have left us.”

Jefferson was less familiar with the teachings of the Buddha, but the similarities with Epicurus are striking. Both men identified desire as the root of all suffering. Both identified tranquility as the ultimate goal of their practice. Both saw the need for a community of like-minded thinkers: the garden for Epicurus, the sangha for the Buddha. And both men apparently liked the number four. The Buddha had the Four Noble Truths, Epicurus the Four-Part Cure.

These similarities might be more than coincidental. Two of Epicurus’s early influences, Democritus and Pyrrho, traveled to India and encountered Buddhist schools there. Perhaps Epicurus had learned of the Buddha’s teaching. Or perhaps both men, journeying by different routes, arrived at the same destination.

Today the Garden has, like nearly everything else, migrated online. This is where I find Tom Merle. I wasn’t looking for Tom. He happened at me.

Tom is a capital-E Epicurean—adhering to the philosopher’s original principles—living in small-e epicurean Napa, California, where the word is synonymous with culinary indulgence. How does he reconcile these upper- and lowercase existences? That is the first question I jot down in my notebook. Questions, though, are like M&M’s, or bags: it’s impossible to have only one. Before long, I’ve filled a dozen pages in my notebook. Epicurus, the apostle of simple living, would not approve.

All my questions, I realize, distill to this: How can a dead Greek dude, prone to cursing and spitting, who lived in a garden and preached a life of radical simplicity, possibly be relevant in today’s complex, high-tech world?

I’ve traveled halfway around the world, from Athens to Napa, in order to meet Tom for an early lunch. I let him choose the venue, partly because it’s his town, but mostly because I’m curious which way he tilts, epicurean or Epicurean. He suggests we meet in the center of town, then walk to the restaurant.

Tom is seventy-three years old but looks a decade younger. He is wearing dark sunglasses, which he never removes, even in the shade, and a silk shirt adorned with colorful wine bottles. Tom is clearly comfortable in his tanned skin. I like him. As we walk, I make small talk, asking about life in Napa.

Tom likes living here, though he tires of the covert preening, the glut of beautiful people—and the utter lack of grit.

Grit is important, I agree. Never trust a place without grit.

Tom steers us to a little café. The menu is simple and inexpensive. Capital-E Epicurean. I order a sandwich called “Settin’ the Woods on Fire,” intrigued by the prospect of Oaxaca cheese and reminded of something I had read about Thoreau. He and a friend accidentally set a sizable parcel of Walden Woods on fire, much to their chagrin.

“Do you want anything to drink with that?” asks the woman who takes our order.

I look at my watch: 11:00 a.m.

“Is it too early for wine?” I ask.

Tom and she exchange a knowing glance. We’ve got a tourist on our hands. In Napa, it is never too early, or too late, for wine.

I order a pinot noir that Tom recommends. We settle into a table outside, the sun warm, the sky a flawless California blue. No grit in sight. A Tesla floats by.

As we wait for our food, I dive into my question—which, when I wasn’t looking, multiplied again into questions.

How did you find Epicurus, I ask Tom, or did Epicurus find you?

Tom explains that he’s always been an “idea person.” He dabbled in philosophy as an undergraduate, but it wasn’t until later, as a graduate student, that he dove deep. It was the 1960s. A good time to be an idea person.

Tom read Spinoza and Kant and others but was drawn to Epicurus and his focus on pleasure. “To me, pleasure is so all-encompassing—even more so than happiness,” he tells me, between sips of wine.

Tom never tires of correcting the record on Epicurus. The philosopher was no foodie, and would be appalled to find a culinary website named after him. He valued the simple life. The low-hanging fruit tastes the best.

I wonder aloud how Tom reconciles the idea of simple living with the reality of living in Napa, a place where the low-hanging fruit is likely a pampered grape bound for a two-hundred-dollar bottle of Merlot and a simple roof over your head can easily set you back a cool million.

It’s not easy, concedes Tom, but it’s possible. You need to do the math.

I wince at the mention of math. For me, math and geometry are right up there with the gods and death in the fear department. I would never have stepped foot in Plato’s Academy, with his strict entry requirement.

All pleasures are good, and all pain bad, explains Tom, but that doesn’t mean we should always choose pleasure over pain. Certain pleasures might lead to future pain and thus should be avoided. The pain of lung cancer outweighs the pleasure of smoking. Likewise, certain pains lead to future pleasure and thus should be endured. The pain of the gym, for instance.

As odd as it may sound, we can reason our way to pleasure, Epicurus taught. If we are unhappy, it is not because we are lazy or flawed. We have simply miscalculated. We have failed to deploy prudence, “sober reasoning,” when appraising pleasure and pain.

Tom is constantly doing the math, “checking his pleasure,” as he puts it. Does the benefit of a given pleasure outweigh the pain exacted?

A few days ago, explains Tom, he noticed that a play he hoped to see was coming to San Francisco. Should he go? On one side of the ledger was the pleasure of watching the performance, but he weighed that against the pain of the ticket price and the agony of California freeway traffic. In the end, Tom decided, that yes, in this case the pleasure outweighed the pain. He bought the tickets.

“Very few things are unadulterated pleasures,” he says. “That’s why this philosophy is perfect for me. I’m a very indecisive person.”

I, too, am flummoxed by choice. Oddly, it is not life’s big decisions—Which career should I pursue?—that stump me but the small ones: Should I order the Guatemalan or Sumatran coffee? At the root of my indecisiveness, I realize, is fear. The fear of making the wrong choice. Choosing the good instead of the best.

As Tom and I sip our Pinot Noir, I’m beginning to see the appeal of Epicureanism. Yet something continues to nag: ataraxia, the lack of mental disturbance that Epicurus considered the highest good. It seems like such a passive form of pleasure. What is wrong with actively satisfying desires? I ask Tom.

“Consider this french fry,” he says, waving one in the air as if it were a wand.

“Okay,” I say, not sure where he is going with this.

“If you have a desire for french fries, it starts with a pain. An absence of the item. A craving. A seeking. An itch.”

“So the pleasure is the scratching of the itch?”

“Right, but it is not something you ever reach because there will always be other pains, others itches that you have to scratch.”

This sounds awful, this endless cycle of itching and scratching. I’m getting itchy just thinking about it. We get a taste of caviar and it is pleasurable, which is good, but then we crave caviar again, and this is problematic. The caviar will never taste as good as the craving hurts. What began as a pleasure ends as pain. The only solution is to minimize those desires.

Inevitably, the conversation swerves to wine. I assume Tom, denizen of Napa, is something of a wine snob. I am wrong. Tom Merle, resident of Napa, amateur oenologist, stakeholder in a catering firm called “Splendor in a Glass,” drinks Two-Buck Chuck. The wine, by Charles Shaw, sells for two dollars a bottle, and sells well.

“Really, Tom? The cheap stuff?”

“It’s table wine, and it’s not bad. To spend thirty-five dollars on something that is consumed, swallowed, then gone, is nuts. There’s a reason Charles Shaw is successful. Two-Buck Chuck is decent wine. It’s what I call ‘good-enough wine.’ ”

“Good enough?”

“Yes. I would say good enough is good enough. It leaves you time for the more important parts of life. Besides, nothing is enough for the man to whom enough is too little,” says Tom, channeling Epicurus.

I stop mid-sip. How much is enough? I’ve rarely stopped to ask that question. I’ve always assumed the answer is “more than I have now.” It turns out that “more” is a moving target. Psychologists call it the “hedonic treadmill.” This quirk of human nature explains why that third crème brûlée never tastes as good as the first or second. It explains why the new car that thrilled us on the test drive bores us after a month on the road. We acclimate to new pleasures, rendering them neither new nor quite as pleasurable.

We’re particularly susceptible to what I call Just-a-Bit-More-ism. We don’t need a lot more—money, success, friends—in order to be happy. Just a bit more. When we get that bit more, we recalibrate and calculate we need… just a bit more. We don’t know how much is enough.

Good enough doesn’t mean settling. Good enough isn’t a cop-out. Good enough represents an attitude of deep gratitude toward whatever happens at you. Not only is the perfect the enemy of the good but the good is the enemy of the good enough. Follow the creed of good enough for long enough and something remarkable happens. The “enough” drops away, like a snake sloughing its skin, and what remains is simply the Good.

Epicurus considered friendship one of life’s great pleasures. “Of all the things which contribute to a blessed life, none is more important, more fruitful, than friendship,” he said. Friends, he added, are essential during meals, like the one Tom and I are enjoying. To eat and drink without a friend is “to devour like the lion and the wolf.”

Epicurus’s emphasis on friendship seems to contradict his pleasure-first principle. Genuine friendship, after all, means sometimes placing a friend’s pleasure above your own. Doesn’t that throw off the hedonic calculus? No, says Epicurus. Friendship, taken as a whole, alleviates pain and promotes pleasure. Whatever pain is associated with friendship is more than offset by its pleasures.

It dawns on me that Tom and I are having an Epicurean moment. A simple meal, paired with a good-enough wine. The luxury of friendship, and time. The pleasure of painlessness, of ataraxia. I register my agreeable state of mind but don’t dwell on it, lest I fall prey to the Pleasure Paradox. Happiness contemplated is happiness lost.

As we say good-bye, I ask Tom if he can recommend a coffee shop. I’m hoping he suggests a quirky local place where dedicated staff lovingly craft each cup. A special place.

“There’s a Starbucks down the road,” he says.

I am disappointed, but stop and ask myself, “What would Epicurus do?” He would go to Starbucks, of course. So I do.

It is not quirky. It is not staffed by loving baristas. It is not special. It is good enough.

In other words, perfect.