How much is enough?
I was sitting in a Being Mastery programme when a colleague of mine, Luca, asked me a question I couldn’t answer. We were in a breakout room talking about work, and I was describing how much I worked, probably with that familiar mixture of pride, necessity and exhaustion with which many of us talk about being busy. There is often a little virtue tucked into these stories. Yes, it is a lot. Yes, I am tired. But look how much I can carry. Luca listened for a while and then asked me, very simply, “Marijana, how much work is enough?”
I don’t remember exactly what I said next. I remember what happened inside me. The question stopped me. Not How much work can you do? I have decades of evidence on that. Not Could you do more? Almost certainly. There is always another client, another project, another article, another opportunity, another thing that could be improved if I gave it another hour. Luca had asked something much stranger: How much is enough? I realised I didn’t know. More troublingly, I wasn’t sure I had ever thought I was supposed to know.
Since then, his question has widened into a bigger inquiry for me about the operating model underneath a life: the assumptions we carry about security, work, success, responsibility and sufficiency. We spend enormous amounts of time learning how to create more. We set targets, stretch goals and growth ambitions. We optimise, scale, accumulate, improve and become. Yet if we have never developed any internal means of recognising the point at which more becomes enough, striving has no natural stopping rule. Luca had asked me about work. I have begun to wonder whether he was really asking how I would know when the life I was building contained enough of what I was building it for.
When scarcity gets inside us
Scarcity is easy enough to understand when there genuinely is not enough: not enough food, money, housing, time, safety or opportunity. Those realities matter, and any conversation about scarcity that immediately turns it into a mindset risks becoming glib. I have known periods in my own life when financial pressure genuinely changed how I behaved. After divorce, moving from two incomes to one altered the calculations around work, contracts, security and risk. When the margin becomes smaller, you watch more carefully. You become alert to what might happen next, and saying yes to work can feel less like ambition than insurance against an uncertain future.
The interesting thing is that behaviours learned in scarcity do not necessarily disappear the moment circumstances change. I think about the messages many of us grew up with: finish what is on your plate, don’t waste food, make do with what you have. In many families these were not simply lessons in manners or thrift. They were inheritances from parents and grandparents who had experienced war, migration, depression, unemployment or periods when resources genuinely were scarce. A child can inherit the behaviour without ever experiencing the circumstances that originally made it sensible.
My mother once resisted the pull to replace our perfectly serviceable black-and-white television simply because colour televisions were becoming the norm. Other people might be getting them, but ours still worked. There is something wonderfully sane in that position, although it becomes increasingly difficult to sustain when the world around us is constantly changing the reference point. The television still works exactly as well after the neighbours buy a colour one. The car still gets us where we need to go after someone else drives home in something newer. Our income may meet our needs until we discover what somebody comparable earns. Our house can remain physically unchanged while somehow becoming less satisfactory after we see somebody else’s kitchen.
“Keeping up with the Joneses” captures something more interesting than simple envy. We rarely decide what enough means in isolation. We look sideways. Our understanding of sufficiency is partly socially constructed, which means the line can keep moving without anything about our actual needs having changed. Add advertising, social media and an economy that depends substantially upon continued consumption, and there is an enormous amount of cultural energy devoted to reminding us of what we do not yet have.
Even apparently objective questions can become surprisingly slippery. I have heard wildly conflicting prescriptions about how much money a person needs for retirement. A million dollars. Less than that. More than that. A particular percentage of current income. A particular number of years of expenditure. Behind each number sits a set of assumptions about longevity, housing, health, risk, desired lifestyle and what the future might bring. The apparently straightforward question How much money is enough? quickly becomes Enough for what life, under what conditions, for how long, with what responsibilities and with what tolerance for uncertainty?
Perhaps that is why scarcity can be so persistent. Sometimes there genuinely isn’t enough. Sometimes there is enough for present needs but uncertainty makes us fear there will not be enough later. And sometimes the experience of scarcity has become so embedded in our way of operating that accumulating more does not necessarily produce greater security. It simply raises the amount we believe we must protect.
The ancient Greeks had a particularly gruesome story about what happens when the problem is no longer the amount available to us. Erysichthon violated a grove sacred to Demeter and was punished with insatiable hunger. He ate, but eating did not make him full. He consumed more, exhausted his resources trying to satisfy himself and, in the darkest versions of the myth, eventually turned upon his own body. It is tempting to read the story simply as a warning against greed, but I think it contains a more unsettling idea. Erysichthon’s punishment was not that there wasn’t enough food. His punishment was that no amount of food could produce the experience of enough. No matter how full the table, it could never solve Erysichthon’s hunger. The distinction matters. There is a difference between having insufficient resources and having an insufficient capacity to experience ourselves as resourced. One problem may require more. The other cannot necessarily be solved by more at all.
I can’t get no satisfaction
Several thousand years after Erysichthon, the Rolling Stones gave us another formulation of essentially the same human problem: I can’t get no satisfaction. The song arrived into a culture increasingly shaped by mass advertising, consumer aspiration and the promise that satisfaction might be found in the next thing. The American Dream carried its own version of the proposition: work hard, rise, acquire, become. Better car, better house, better job, better life. Each achievement might be genuinely valuable, but it also created a new vantage point from which the next possibility became visible.
More recently, The Greatest Showman gave us an even starker formulation in Never Enough. There is something extraordinary about those two words when you stop to consider them. Not not enough yet, which at least leaves open the possibility that sufficiency might eventually arrive. Never enough turns insufficiency into a permanent condition.
Perhaps that is one of the contradictions of modern achievement culture. We recognise endless hunger as a curse when it appears in Greek mythology and sing along when popular culture turns it into an anthem, while many of our ordinary measures of success quietly depend upon the same orientation. More income, more influence, more clients, more qualifications, more evidence that we are progressing. Even personal development can become strangely acquisitive: more insight, greater consciousness, another breakthrough, another version of ourselves waiting somewhere ahead.
None of this makes wanting more inherently problematic. I want things. I have ambitions. I hope I remain curious about what else I might create and who else I might become. The distinction I am becoming interested in is not between ambition and contentment, or between people who want things and those sufficiently enlightened to have stopped wanting them. It is between wanting more and being unable to experience enough.
I have also become less certain about the familiar opposition between scarcity and abundance. We often talk about them as though they sit at opposite ends of a spectrum. Scarcity contracts; abundance expands. Scarcity tells us there isn’t enough; abundance assures us that possibility is everywhere. There is something useful in that distinction, particularly when scarcity thinking leads us to hoard opportunity or imagine that someone else’s success must diminish our own. But abundance can also preserve the underlying orientation towards more. Scarcity says, I need more because there may not be enough. Abundance can say, Why stop? There is always more available. Different stories, perhaps, but potentially the same direction.
It leaves me wondering whether enough sits somewhere else entirely. Not halfway between scarcity and abundance, as though sufficiency were simply a sensible compromise between deprivation and excess, but as a different capacity altogether: the ability to discern what is sufficient for this life, in these circumstances, at this particular point in time. More may be possible without being necessary. Less may sometimes be desirable without being deprivation. Enough does not have to mean settling, and abundance does not require us to consume everything that is available.
I used to have what I thought of as my rocking-chair test. Faced with a consequential choice, I would imagine myself at 65, sitting in a rocking chair, and ask whether that older version of me would regret doing or not doing whatever was in front of me. Sixty-five has become considerably less theoretical as I have grown older, and the imaginary rocking chair may need to be moved further into the future. But the test has taught me something else: enough changes because lives change. What constituted enough security at 30 may not be enough at 60, while something I once believed essential may no longer matter much at all. Enough is not necessarily a number we discover once and laminate. It may be a judgement we have to keep remaking.
Just one wafer-thin mint
Monty Python, perhaps inevitably, found another way into the question. In The Meaning of Life, Mr Creosote sits at a restaurant table having consumed an almost grotesque quantity of food. He is not hungry. He is spectacularly beyond full. Yet the maître d’ manages to persuade him towards one final, tiny addition: the infamous wafer-thin mint. The scene is revolting, hilarious and absurd, but placed alongside Erysichthon it reveals a useful distinction. Erysichthon cannot become full. Mr Creosote cannot stop when full.
Somewhere between those two conditions sits Luca’s question. How would I know? How would I know when I had enough work, enough money, enough recognition, enough security or enough impact? More importantly, what would happen if I did know? That is not simply an intellectual question. Knowing creates an emotional and practical problem because once I decide what enough looks like, I have to decide what to do when something beyond it is offered.
If I know I already have enough work, the next contract is no longer neutral. I may be capable of doing it. I may even enjoy it. The money may be welcome and the work worthwhile. But accepting it means something else will receive less of me. Perhaps that is writing, rest, relationships, travel, unstructured time or simply the capacity to sit somewhere without simultaneously wondering what I should be doing. The real price of one more contract is not written on the contract. It is found in whatever part of my life has to move aside to accommodate it.
This is where “enough” becomes more confronting than it first sounds. If the answer is always more, I never have to make that judgement. Every opportunity can be assessed largely on its own merits: Is this interesting? Can I do it? Will it pay? Might it lead somewhere? But once I admit that there is such a thing as enough, another question appears: What will this require me to exchange for it? Knowing what enough is creates a responsibility to do something with that knowledge.
I once attended a continuing-education workshop for coaches where the facilitator raised a related question. She invited us to consider whether, in the way we work with clients, we might unconsciously import culturally normative assumptions about ambition, achievement and growth. The point was not that a coach should advise someone to reject a promotion, earn less or abandon an ambitious goal. Quite the opposite. Coaching requires us to respect the client’s ownership of those choices. The ethical check is whether our own assumptions quietly influence the questions we ask and the possibilities we privilege.
If a client tells me they want the next executive role, do I become subtly more animated by the prospect of helping them achieve it than I would if they began wondering whether they wanted a smaller role? If someone wants to double their income, grow their company or increase their influence, do I unconsciously treat that as evidence of development? Can I remain curious enough not to assume that more is inherently progress? There is a difference between helping someone examine what they genuinely want and helping them become more effective at wanting what the surrounding culture has taught successful people to want.
That question matters because so much of our language about development already contains a direction of travel. We talk about growth, stretch, potential, advancement and reaching the next level. None of those ideas is wrong, but they can make upward movement seem naturally preferable to staying, simplifying, relinquishing or deciding that something is already sufficient. Part of respecting another person’s agency is being genuinely agnostic about which of those choices constitutes progress for them.
Who gets to decide what is enough?
There is another reason I am wary of turning enough into a new virtue. Not everybody has historically been encouraged to want more, and women in particular know something about the darker uses of sufficiency. There are versions of “enough” that have very little to do with freedom and a great deal to do with containment: you have achieved enough, you earn enough, you have enough responsibility, you are taking up enough space. Don’t expect too much. Don’t ask for too much. Don’t be too much.
There is an older version of this that I think of as a kind of babushka wisdom about men: if he doesn’t beat you and he doesn’t drink too much, that’s enough. It contains the residue of a world in which the range of possibilities available to women was considerably narrower and survival could reasonably be mistaken for a good outcome. But that is not the kind of “enough” I am interested in. There is a world of difference between deciding that I have enough and being told that what I have should be enough for me.
The distinction protects “enough” from becoming another way of keeping people small. A woman wanting more is not necessarily trapped in scarcity, just as a woman deciding she does not want the next promotion is not necessarily lacking ambition. A man choosing more time with his children over another rung on the ladder has not failed to fulfil his potential. Someone deciding that their present income is sufficient when they could earn considerably more has not necessarily lost their edge. Enough is not a ceiling imposed upon us. Properly understood, it is an expression of agency: the capacity to decide for ourselves what is sufficient, what is worth pursuing and what we are no longer willing to exchange for more.
It makes “enough” less like a fixed point on a scale and more like an ongoing act of discernment. There may be seasons when more is exactly what is required: more income, more security, more challenge, more visibility, more help, more courage. There may be others when the next opportunity asks too high a price. What matters is not locating a permanent midpoint between scarcity and abundance but becoming more conscious of the assumptions moving us towards either acquisition or restraint.
Luca’s question has already changed some of this for me. I still could not tell him exactly how much work is enough, but I work fewer hours now. I am more conscious about the contracts I accept and where I spend my time. I am less inclined to treat the existence of an opportunity as sufficient reason to take it. I have not solved the problem of enough; I have simply become more aware that the question exists, and that has altered the choices I make.
My answer will continue to change because my life will continue to change. The amount of security I needed after divorce is not necessarily the amount I need now. The 65-year-old woman I once imagined sitting in a rocking chair has become considerably less theoretical. Perhaps that’s the point. Knowing exactly where the line sits matters less than knowing that there is a line, that I have some agency in deciding where it belongs, and that I can move it when life changes.
Erysichthon never found one. No matter how full his table became, the hunger remained. Mr Creosote had passed the point of sufficiency long before the wafer-thin mint arrived. The Rolling Stones couldn’t get satisfaction, while Never Enough transformed the absence of sufficiency into something soaring and beautiful. The persistence of the story should tell us something. Human beings seem remarkably good at imagining what we might acquire next and considerably less practised at recognising when what we already have is sufficient.
Luca’s question has stayed with me because it interrupts that story. It doesn’t ask whether another contract, purchase, achievement or possibility is available. There will almost always be one more of something. It asks us to make a judgement about the relationship between what we gain and what we give away to acquire it. The question is not simply whether there is more. It is whether more is still worth what it will cost.
Dr Jordan Marijana Alexander is an executive advisor, human systems strategist and writer exploring how identity, place, culture and living systems shape participation in the modern world. She works alongside leaders, boards and organisations navigating complex questions of leadership, change and participation, and is the co-founder of RelateAble.Global. If this article has raised questions, sparked reflection or highlighted a decision you’re carrying, you’re invited to book a confidential conversation. You can follow DrJMA on LinkedIn and Engenesis for ongoing essays, reflections and research exploring leadership, identity, belonging and participation.