Enough is All You Need

Issue No. 9 : The journey from clutter and overconsumption to simply being grateful for having enough every day

A February heat wave hit Southern California a few weeks ago and the only thing we need is to be outdoors and enjoy nature. Photo: Per Håkansson.

What used to be scarce for the majority of people on our planet just 50 years ago – food, material things, information, entertainment, drugs, work, and people – is now accessible all the time from anywhere to the vast majority of people.

There is enough of everything in the world today to keep everyone’s essential needs met and satisfied (sans distribution and politics) so we can make the switch to self-actualization. But that’s not what’s happening.

In this new world of abundance, the collective response has surprisingly not been to be grateful for having enough to meet our basic needs but to keep chasing more despite being detrimental to our human and planetarian wellbeing.

After not having had enough of anything for almost 300,000 years, you would think that we would be stoked as a species to finally have what we need to survive with a fairly low effort. But no, we keep on chasing more.

The reasons for this are many: our Paleolithic scarcity mind, the drive for influence and status, our mass consumption culture, the desire to belong, new digital channels, marketing and advertising, mental health issues and a few more.

It doesn’t help that most everything that is being made today is designed for us to crave more, from processed foods to the algorithms that power everything digital. This is powered by what’s called The Scarcity Loop (from earlier newsletter).

But it’s possible to break this endless search for the next shiny thing.

During the past two decades I’ve explored living with less, what I call fewer better things. It’s simply to only own the basic essentials in life, the things that you use frequently and that are aligned with who you’re and what you need in life.

Enough is easy to define because it’s very exact. What I really need in life are the following: