When Is Enough, Enough?
This isn’t about relationships. 🤣
On the way into work I typically listen to audiobooks on Audible. For the longest time it was only music, then for many years it was Joe Rogan, Jimmy Dore, and Patrick Bet-David. Over the last year it has almost exclusively been audiobooks. I’ve learned a lot. It has changed my life in many ways.
Today I was re-listening to a title in my catalog, “The Psychology of Money” by Morgan Housel. As I was cruising in on I-84 at 6am he got to a passage where he mentioned someone in a argument/discussion about the ongoing quest to make more money. To get more power. To reach the next level.
I forget now who the admired person was that he was quoting but he essentially said, “I have what John Rockefeller will never have. Enough.”
What a monumental quote. You have to sit and think about it to really take it in. What a place to be. Where you stop competing with everyone. Where you stop competing with yourself. Where everything you have is enough.
Sounds so zen to me. Sounds like a dude chanting on the top of a mountain in Tibet. Orange robe. Serene. Peaceful. Probably starving. I would try it. But I would miss pizza. I wonder if they have pizza in Tibet.
Ingrained in modern society, in the pursuit of the Western philosophy, the American Dream, is the constant desire and push to have more. Maybe it is more money, more time, more beauty, more cars, more food, more bedrooms, more square footage in your backyard swimming pool, more designer purses. This is capitalism. This is ambition. It is also unsustainable. How can we always be pursuing more? It reminds me of the Lorax. Pretty soon all of the Truffula Trees are gone.
But also, what is wrong with trying harder? Getting better? Increasing your skillset? Making more money because you have made yourself more valuable? What is enough and when do you get it?
I wonder if this is a constraint that previous civilizations did not experience. Did they have enough? Did they give up on enough because they knew upward progression was impossible? Was the wealth so concentrated at the top that it was unreachable if you were not born into it?
It feels possible to achieve enough sometimes. On days when you accomplish more than you planned, and you sit back on the couch at 8pm. To me, that is enough. I put in everything I could and burned the fuck out of those daylight hours. It was invigorating. It was exciting. The days I achieve nothing - which are few an far between - I do not feel enough. So you can quantify it by task achievement. Maybe let’s quantify with money.
There were years where I said, “If I make $XXX amount of money, I’ll be set.”
Then I reached that amount, and I kept going. Now I have goals that I intend to achieve, and when I reach them, I’m sure they will get moved again.
I’m not sure what the right answer is, or if it ever gets revealed. I do know that I get smarter each day and one of the most important items to find enough of is: peace.
When you realize you can only change what you can change, and you let go of that which is out of your control, you find serenity. You find a peaceful calm. Sometimes that is enough.
