School is starting this week.
I know this because my calendar, which had achieved a kind of summer serenity, now looks like a tetris board of sadness, except one in which the pieces are overlapping each other haphazardly. Our blended family of three to four kids (depending on the day), means we, as parents, are outnumbered. That wasn’t the plan when I had my two kids, but it’s now our reality. Suddenly I am less a person who got to retire early and more a person who drives a very busy shuttle service between dance, theater rehearsals, and cross-country meets, not to mention my own events.
And I’m reminded right now of why I decided to retire early in the first place. It was to regain some tranquility and control over my schedule. It was to put a line in the sand and say, “ok, I now have enough money and now I want more time”. For everything else besides time, more is not better. In our house, more is chaos.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the idea of enough. How hard it is to actually live there and maintain a lifestyle centered around having “enough”. Why American culture makes this almost impossible, but why it’s worth pursuing anyway.
In America, We Can Never Have “Enough”
We, in the United States, are surrounded, constantly, by a culture that treats “more” as the default direction of a good life. More money, more stuff, more square footage, more developments, more activities, more followers and more options. The entire architecture of modern consumer society is designed to make you feel that whatever you currently have is insufficient and that the next thing, the upgrade or the additional item, will be the one that finally tips the scale toward satisfaction.
Spoiler Alert: It won’t. This has been documented extensively by researchers in happiness and behavioral economics. The hedonic treadmill keeps moving. The new car stops feeling new. The bigger house fills with things until it feels small again. The raise gets absorbed into a new baseline of spending. We adapt, and then we want more. Our brain is built to work this way.
The advertising industry spends hundreds of billions of dollars a year working against us. The social media ecosystem is built on it. The cultural story we tell ourselves, that ambition means always reaching for the next level, reinforces it. We call people who are satisfied with what they have “complacent.” We celebrate the relentless pursuit of more as a virtue and treat people who quit their high-paying jobs to work at REI with skepticism (and some jealously, too).
I know why I retired early, but this messaging still gets to me, even now that I know I have “enough”. I was recently offered yet another full-time job (one I knew I’d really like) and I thought about it hard, instantly forgetting about all of the benefits of having more space and time in my life to pursue the things that really matter. Forgetting that I’ve “unretired” before and hated it. The pursuit of being happy with “enough” is never-ending.
My 13-Year-Old’s Floor (A Case Study in Backwards Living)
My daughter has a layer of stuff on her bedroom floor that I estimate is approximately a foot deep. Maybe more. If you go in there and try to sift through it (which I have!), it’s an archaeological dig through time and through the generosity of our relatives and friends. Gifts from grandparents who love her, presents from birthday parties, things she asked for and received, things she didn’t ask for but couldn’t bear to give away. She is surrounded by abundance and wonders why she can’t find the shirt she wants to wear.
My daughter is an accurate reflection of the culture she’s growing up in, one that has given her the message, from every direction, that things equal love and more things equal more love and getting rid of things means losing some of that love. Despite my best efforts of leading by example, these messages break through and now her room is a disaster.
Many years ago, I even cleaned her room and she quickly declared that she loved it and that she would never make it dirty again. Right. Maintaining your lifestyle of “enough” takes just as much care and feeding as reaching your goals in the first place.
She, just like me, finds it hard to hear over the noise of everything else telling her to keep accumulating. Opportunities keep coming. Gifts keep showing up. We’re caught in a whirlwind we didn’t set in motion but that we find extremely hard to step out of.
I recognize this pattern because I live a version of it myself. Working full-time again is my foot of stuff on the floor.
The Voice in my Head
What makes retiring so hard in the first place? For me, it’s the voice in my head: What if you need more? What if this isn’t quite enough? What if you took this one interesting opportunity, just for the cushion, just in case?
I retired early. I did the math, many times. Then I built a life I genuinely love filled with teaching, coaching, writing, travel, and time with my kids. I worked for years to get here, made deliberate financial choices, gave up things along the way that I thought were worth giving up in exchange for this particular version of freedom.
And still the voice shows up. Dressed up as prudence, as ambition, as the reasonable concern of a responsible adult. “Cushion” sounds so sensible. Who could argue with a cushion? What if, in the future, I really do want to travel all the time and fly business class everywhere? Maybe I do need more money?
But life is full of trade-offs. As the podcaster Paula Pant says, “you can afford anything, you just can’t afford everything”. I know what that cushion actually costs. It costs the mornings. The travel. The pace. The ability to say no to things that don’t fit. My ability to have board game days in the middle of the week. It costs the very thing I spent years building, in exchange for more of something I already have enough of.
The voice isn’t prudence. It’s the “more” machine, wearing a very convincing disguise.
What “Enough” Actually Looks Like
I’ve been thinking about what a life organized around enough rather than more actually looks like. Not as deprivation or lowered ambition, but as a real alternative framework.
It would mean being honest about what you actually need, separate from what you’ve been told you should want. A bigger house sounds appealing in the abstract. Does it actually make your life better, or does it just give you more to clean and more to pay for?
It would mean treating your attention the same way you treat your money, as a finite resource that deserves deliberate allocation. Every activity added to the kids’ schedule is attention taken from somewhere else. More activities doesn’t mean a richer childhood. It often means a more exhausted one.
It would mean getting comfortable with a kind of quiet that American culture often looks at as laziness. The ability to sit with what you have, to feel it as sufficient, is not complacency. It is, arguably, one of the harder things to achieve in a society that is constantly trying to convince you otherwise.
And it would mean, practically, building some version of what my daughter hasn’t quite learned yet: the habit of letting go. It means regularly asking whether what you’re holding onto is actually serving you, or whether you’re just afraid of the loss.
Why “Enough” Is Often Far Better Than “More”
Here’s the case I keep making to myself, on the days when the voice gets out of hand:
If more of us focused on enough rather than more, the environmental math would look different. Consumption at the scale we currently practice it is not sustainable. The stuff my daughter can’t walk across her floor to reach had to be made somewhere, shipped somewhere, packaged in something, and will eventually be thrown away somewhere. Multiply that by 330 million Americans doing a version of the same thing and you start to understand why the planet is in the shape it’s in.
Our bank accounts would look different. The financial industry has an entire vocabulary designed to convince you that you need more (insurance, diversification, advice, products) when what most people actually need is to spend less than they earn for long enough that they stop having to think about it. Enough, invested consistently, produces freedom. More, spent continuously, produces anxiety.
Our spaces would be calmer. There is research on this (I’ve written about it before) showing that cluttered environments elevate cortisol levels throughout the day. The foot of stuff on my daughter’s floor is not neutral. It is actively, physiologically stressful (both for me and for her). Less stuff means a calmer nervous system. I learned this when my husband moved in with us and took over the cleaning and decluttering. I finally had the beautiful, calm house of my dreams and I got it because we eliminated a lot of things and he’s doing a lot of the maintenance required to keep it clutter-free.
Finally, our minds would be quieter. The mental load of managing more stuff, more commitments, more options, and more obligations is real and cumulative. Every thing you own is something to maintain, organize, insure, clean, repair, or eventually dispose of. Every commitment you take on is something to show up for, reschedule, or feel guilty about missing. Enough is not just financially or environmentally better. It is neurologically better.
How to Maintain “Enough”
I don’t think the answer is some radical minimalism that requires getting rid of everything and living with thirty possessions. Though some days, that’s all I want to do.
The answer, the one I keep arriving at anyway, is something more like regular practice. The practice of noticing when more is being offered and asking whether you actually want it, or whether you’ve just been conditioned to say yes. It’s the practice of looking at what you have and feeling it as sufficient rather than scanning for what’s missing. The practice of telling your daughter that the hoodie is easier to find when there are fewer things on the floor, and knowing that someday, when she’s ready, she’ll understand what you mean.
Enough is not a destination. It’s a discipline and a practice.
And some weeks, like back to school weeks, it takes more work to maintain “enough” than during other weeks. But it’s still the right place to aim for.
More is loud. Enough is quiet. And quiet, it turns out, is exactly what I was working toward all along.
I’ve written about the relationship between clutter and stress before, including the science behind why clearing stuff out actually lowers your cortisol, in this post. And if you’re wrestling with what enough looks like in your own life and career, coaching might be a useful conversation.
