The Society Co.

I'm engrossed in a book by Daniel Klein called Travels with Epicurus . Read it? Klein is a 70+ year old who travels to the Greek island of Hydra in search of how to live an authentic old age. He goes to study the old folk there, whom, he believes, live their elderly years contently. Klein travels with a stash of philosophy books on how to live a good life, including works written by Epicurus, an ancient Greek philosopher whose notions of a good life revolved around simple pleasures and self-sufficiency (and hence, freedom). He wrote: "Not what we have, but what we enjoy, constitutes our abundance."

Living simply, as a minimalist, is like Henry Thoreau going to the woods. It forces you to live deliberately and to front only the essential facts of life. Thoreau embarked on a two-year experiment in simple living in 1845, when he moved to a small, self-built house in the woods: