Reaching Enough
Just one surprising (and empowering) insight about what it takes to reach enough.
I have recently reached a curious place. I have reached Enough.
Where is Enough? Enough is this place where I feel fundamentally content with what I have and where I am in life. This is a peculiar place indeed, hidden in plain sight in a world where the default mode is a continual striving for more.
I have followed the logical path towards Enough for many years, and I hoped that one day it would bring me here. That path is paved with salary increases, income-generating investments, bucket list checkmarks, and books moved to the “read”-section of the shelf. That path has gotten me closer, indeed, but until recently, it never got me quite to the final destination. Never quite to Enough.
So how did I ultimately get here? By choice.
Enough is a choice.
The choice is to pick appreciation over envy, contentment over greed, and inner peace over unhinged ambition. The choice is to disregard scarcity, and embrace a sense of sufficiency and security. The choice is to make the goalpost stop moving.
I believe the choice can be made at all levels of wealth and prosperity. In some sense, perhaps in a rational sense, it should be easier to make the choice if you have plenty of resources. But in another sense, as most relatively-well-off homo sapiens can attest to, the more you have, the more elusive Enough can become.
One of the big ironies of the human condition is that the richest folks among us so often end up utterly unhappy, while many relatively poor people live lives of joy and meaning. The rich and unhappy population grows out of mimetic desire, our tendency to want what the people around us want and have. The more those around us have, the more we want, and the less we feel content with what we do have. This doom loop of mimetic desire leaves us ever separated from Enough. But it doesn’t have to be that way. The alternative is to choose Enough, regardless of how much or how little you have at this moment.
Choosing Enough is simple, but not easy. Choosing Enough means rejecting mimesis, which is fundamentally human, and embracing contentment, which is fundamentally not. Choosing Enough takes some real work.
That work is worth doing, and the choice is worth making. Because choosing Enough leads you to a distinctive sense of freedom and agency. From a place of Enough, you are free to live your life based on what you genuinely want to do and to be, rather than what you should do to satiate a hunger for more.
From Enough, you can even choose ambition without incurring dissonance. You can choose to do more, to create more, to contribute more, to make more, to grow more – even when you don’t need more. Whatever choices you make from a sense of Enough will be pure and sincere choices, exactly because you don’t need anything more to be content.
I have been operating from a sense of scarcity for 30 years. The world is an uncertain place, and accumulating resources, options, knowledge, relationships, stuff and information has been my default strategy to increase my odds of surviving and thriving in the face of that uncertainty. I’ll probably dip back into that sense of scarcity from time to time – but I hope I’ll be able to make Enough my home base for the long run, by choosing Enough again and again.
I have that same hope for you, too. Thank you for reading.