Epicureanism: Enough, and No Fear

You wanted the thing for months. The bigger apartment, the better title, the phone with the better camera, it hardly matters which. You planned for it, you got it, and for about a week it was wonderful. Then the wonderful quietly wore off, the way it always does, and the wanting did not stop. It moved. It found the next apartment, the next title, the next thing one notch above what you now hold. You are richer than you were and no calmer, because the gap between what you have and what you want reopened the moment you closed it.

A man built a whole philosophy on closing that gap for good, and his name has since come to mean nearly the opposite of what he taught. Call a meal epicurean today and you mean rich food, good wine, an expensive and slightly showy taste. The historical Epicurus lived on bread, water, and now and then a little pot of cheese, which he once wrote to a friend to ask for so that he could, in his word, feast[Diogenes Laertius, Lives X]. He taught in a garden on the edge of Athens, a school unusual for its time in admitting women and enslaved people as students, and he argued something that sounds like a contradiction and is not: the life of the greatest pleasure and the life of plain simplicity are, seen clearly, the same life.

This is the second of the traditions, and it sits right beside the first. Where the Stoics in the last chapter governed the judgment, the Epicureans went after the wanting itself. Get the wanting right, they said, and most of what disturbs you never gets started.

Start with the word that gets Epicurus mocked. He did say pleasure is the point. He called it the beginning and the end of the happy life, the first good we are born knowing, the thing every choice finally answers to. The mockery assumes he meant the pleasure of more: another course, another drink, another sensation stacked on the last. He meant almost the reverse.

For Epicurus the highest pleasure is not a sensation you add. It is a pair of absences you arrive at. Freedom from pain in the body, which the Greeks called aponia. Freedom from disturbance in the mind, ataraxia. When the body is not in want and the mind is not in turmoil, you are already in the fullest pleasure there is, and no banquet can take you higher. "By pleasure," he wrote to his student Menoeceus, "we mean the absence of pain in the body and of trouble in the soul."[Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus] The settled state is not the boring runway you taxi along on the way to real pleasure. It is the destination.

That reframing has a sharp consequence, and Epicurus drew it out as a kind of law. Pleasure has a ceiling, and the ceiling is the removal of all pain. Once the hunger is gone, you cannot get more full. Once the cold is gone, you cannot get more warm. Past that point, the scholars who read him carefully draw a line between two kinds of pleasure: the steady, standing pleasure of being well, and the moving pleasure of variety laid on top. The exact shape of that distinction is still argued over, but the ethical payload is not. Beyond the point where want is removed, more does not raise the pleasure. It only varies it.

Sit with what the figure says, because it quietly dismantles the upgrade treadmill from the chapter on the quiet mind. The reason the bigger apartment stopped thrilling you is not that you are ungrateful or broken. It is that you had already reached the ceiling with the apartment you had. Shelter that keeps out the cold and rain delivers the whole pleasure of shelter. The granite counters change the flavor of the evening. They do not raise your contentment, which was already as high as it goes. You spent a great deal to move sideways along the top of the curve and called it climbing.

If pleasure has a low and reachable ceiling, then the real problem is never pleasure. It is desire, which keeps writing checks the ceiling cannot cash. So Epicurus did to desire what the Stoics did to events: he sorted it. Not into two bins this time, but three.

Some desires are natural and necessary. These are the body's genuine needs and the mind's. Epicurus sketches the three-way cut in the letter to Menoeceus and lays it out in full in Principal Doctrine 29, with an ancient scholion splitting the necessary desires finer still: some are necessary for life itself, some for the body's freedom from pain, and some for happiness. Food when you are hungry. Warmth and shelter. Safety. The steadiness of mind this whole book is about. Some desires are natural but not necessary: real pleasures that nature understands, like a rich and varied meal, but that you do not actually need, because they only vary a contentment you could reach without them. And some desires are neither natural nor necessary. Epicurus called these empty, or vain. They are manufactured by opinion, by comparison, by status, and they are the dangerous ones.

The whole engine is in the right-hand column of that figure: the limit. Natural desires come with a built-in stopping point, because they are answers to a real lack, and when the lack is filled they fall quiet. Hunger ends. Cold ends. The vain desires have no such point. Wealth, fame, status, the generalized hunger for more, none of these is a response to a real lack, so nothing fills them. There is always a larger number, a wider audience, a person one rung up. Epicurus's diagnosis of anxiety is almost mechanical. You are suffering because you have hitched your peace to a desire that, by its nature, can never report back satisfied.

One of his Principal Doctrines states the line that makes the whole system practical. The wealth that nature asks for is limited and easy to come by. The wealth that empty opinion asks for runs on to infinity. Read those two sentences as a budget. Nature's bill is small and you can almost always pay it. Opinion's bill is endless and you will die owing it, no matter how much you earn against it.

This is what Epicurus meant by the freedom in self-sufficiency, autarkeia. He did not prize doing without for its own sake. He was no ascetic punishing the body. He prized the low floor because a low floor is freedom. If your contentment needs little, then little can threaten it, and you are no longer at the mercy of everyone who controls the things you think you need. "Nothing is enough," runs one of the sayings collected from him, "to one for whom enough is very little."[Epicurus, Vatican Sayings] The trap is the moving target that makes any amount feel like too little.

And the practice that follows is gentler than it sounds. Eat plainly most of the time, he said, not as a penance but so that the occasional rich meal lands as a real delight rather than an expectation, and so that you never come to need it. Train your wants downward toward the things that are easy to get and hard to lose. Plain bread to a hungry person, he wrote, gives the very highest pleasure. The aim is a life whose pleasures are cheap, sturdy, and close at hand, so that calm stops depending on a delivery that may not come.

There is one good Epicurus would not call optional, and it is the one a philosophy of self-sufficiency might be expected to skip. Friendship. He ranked it at the very top. Of all the things wisdom provides for a happy life, he said, by far the greatest is the having of friends. Not useful contacts, not a network, but a few people whose good you care about and who care about yours.

Part of his reason is hard-headed. Most of what we chase wealth and power for is really security, the sense that we will be all right if things go wrong. Epicurus thought wealth and power buy that badly, because they make enemies and invite anxiety, while friends buy it well. The deepest security a person can have is a handful of people who will show up. But he also wrote about friendship in a way that is not hard-headed at all. "Friendship dances around the world," he said, "announcing to each of us that we must awaken to happiness."[Epicurus, Vatican Sayings] The Garden was not just a school. It was a working demonstration that the calm life is a shared one, eaten at a common table, among people who have stopped competing with each other for things that were never worth the contest. This is the route the next chapters on Buddhist lovingkindness and on the contemplative traditions will pick up again: calm is rarely a solo achievement.

Reading the three categories is easy. Sorting your actual wants is where it bites, because so many vain desires arrive disguised as needs. Below are nine ordinary wants. Put each in the kind of wanting it really belongs to, then check against Epicurus and run the pass that matters most: of everything here, what do you actually need.

The point is not to shame the middle and right columns out of existence. A good meal is a real pleasure, and there is no virtue in refusing it. What the sort gives you is a clear view of which wants can ever be satisfied and which are built to keep you running, so that you can rest your peace on the first kind and hold the second kind loosely. Almost all the wanting that wakes you at three in the morning lives in that right-hand column, chasing a number with no top.

The other half of Epicurean calm is about a fear that no amount of enough can touch, because it is not about wanting at all. The fear of death. Epicurus thought it was the root anxiety under most of the others, the thing that makes us grab for more in the first place, and he met it head on with an argument that is still, more than two thousand years later, genuinely unsettling.

Death, he said, is nothing to us. Not nothing as in unimportant, but nothing as in there is no one home for it to happen to. Work it through. While you exist, death is not here. When death is here, you do not exist. The two never occupy the same moment. So there is no point on the timeline at which death is a harm you are present to suffer. "When we are," he put it, "death is not come, and when death is come, we are not."[Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus] Being dead is not a dark room you sit in, or an experience that goes badly. It is the absence of any experiencer.

The Roman poet Lucretius, writing the system into verse a couple of centuries later, gave the argument the image that makes it stick. Look back, he said, at the whole stretch of time before you were born. Endless. And it did not trouble you in the slightest. You did not lie awake through those eons feeling left out of the world. Your death is the mirror of that. The endless time after you are gone will be exactly as untroubling to you as the endless time before you arrived, and for the same reason: you will not be there.

This argument has real limits, and overselling it would betray the whole spirit of the approach taken here. It is aimed precisely at the fear of being dead, the state of not existing. It is very good at that. It does much less for the fear of dying, the process, the pain or indignity or slowness of the road there, which is a real thing happening to someone who still exists and which deserves real care, not a syllogism. And it does nothing at all for grief, for the loss of the people we love, which is not about our own non-existence but about the hole left in a world we are still in. The strongest modern reply, made by the philosopher Thomas Nagel, grants that death is no torment you undergo and yet insists it can still be bad, because it deprives you of the years and goods you would otherwise have had. A robbery does not have to hurt at the moment it happens to be a loss.

So take the argument for what it honestly is. Not a cure for caring about life, and not a reason to feel nothing. A specific, targeted relief from one specific dread: the picture of yourself trapped in some terrible aftermath. There is no aftermath you will be present for. That picture, at least, you can set down.

The Epicureans were good at compression. Two centuries after Epicurus, one of his followers, Philodemus, preserved the whole therapy in four compressed lines, later found charred on a papyrus scroll buried by Vesuvius at Herculaneum. The Greeks called it the tetrapharmakos, the four-drug remedy, named after a standard salve made of four ingredients. Its surviving attribution and text are not Epicurus's own words, and its exact authorship is not settled either, but it is a fair summary of his first four doctrines, and it is the most portable version of this chapter you can carry.

Read top to bottom, it takes the two great fears and the two great confusions in turn. The first line clears the sky: for Epicurus the divine, whatever it is, is perfectly content and not in the business of running your life or punishing it, so there is no cosmic verdict to dread. A secular reader can take the same relief in plainer terms, that the universe is not a courtroom with your name on the docket. The second line is the death argument we just walked. The third is the limit of pleasure, that the good is cheap and near. The fourth is the one we have not named yet, and it is a small mercy worth keeping: pain, Epicurus observed, does not in fact run past what you can bear. When it is intense it is usually short, and when it drags on it is usually mild. The unbearable, all-consuming, endless version we rehearse in advance is mostly a thing of the imagination, the same imagination that ran the silence in the last chapter and the upgrade in this one.

Take the apartment from the first page, and run it through the method.

Start with the want, named honestly. It is not, on inspection, a need for shelter. You already have shelter that keeps out the cold and the rain, which means you are already at the ceiling of what shelter can give. The pull toward the bigger place came from somewhere else: a friend's place that made yours feel small, a sense that someone at your stage should have more by now. That is the tell. A want triggered by comparison, with no fixed point where it would call itself satisfied, is sitting in the vain column, however much it dresses itself as practical.

Now find the limit. What would actually be different in the larger apartment, once the first novelty wore off the way it wore off last time. A bit more room, soon full of more things. A nicer view you would stop seeing within a month. Against that, the real cost: years of the bill that opinion writes and nature never asked for, and the low-grade dread of carrying it. The pleasure on offer is the kind that only varies what you have. The cost is the kind that follows you.

Then apply the cure. The good you are actually after, the feeling of being all right, of being at home in your life, is cheap and already within reach: this room, warm and dry, a few people you can call, an evening with nothing owed. The dread underneath the wanting, the quiet sense that without more you will somehow not be safe, is the long fear in a smaller coat, and it answers to the same fact: the security you want is not for sale at the rent office. It is built from enough and from friends, both of which you can largely have now.

None of this means you must stay where you are, or that wanting a nicer home is a sin. You might move for honest reasons, more light, less noise, closer to people you love. The Epicurean move is only to take the comparison out of the wanting, so the decision is yours and not the treadmill's. You stop chasing the next rung as if your calm were waiting on it. You notice, with something like relief, that enough has been quietly available the whole time. That is the settled state Epicurus was pointing at. Not a life stripped bare, but a life no longer running.