Look. Look here, at me. This is a yacht. I own this yacht. I am reclining in a comfortable chair on my yacht, which I own. We can all agree that my life is good, and I am successful. Otherwise, would I be on this yacht?

Sometimes people ask, “What makes a life worth living?” Socrates asked stuff like this, but yachts didn’t exist back then. Sometimes people say, “A man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?” Robert Browning said this, but Robert Browning never managed to grasp a yacht.

Look at my yacht again. It is big. And white. It has a Jacuzzi. It cost much more money than most people earn in a year, and it was advertised in magazines that the non- wealthy don’t even know exist. There is an attractive younger woman with me on this yacht. She’s wearing a yellow bikini. No one could argue that my life is not worth living.

Maybe it is possible that people without yachts have lives that are worth living too. Maybe people in Hartford or Africa somehow manage to find meaning in their cashier jobs or their heroin, or in thinking about yachts. I don’t know if this is possible, though, because I don’t need to. I am someone who owns a yacht.

I have had a long, successful career at an investment bank. I put in tens of thousands of hours of my life, and these hours turned into money. Then I went to a boat deal- ership, and I turned that money into a yacht. I also turned some of the money into younger women in bikinis. This one is named Naomi, or something that sounds like Naomi.

Naomi likes boats.

—B. Garfinkel