Yesterday my son and I went to the park to meet a friend of his for a playdate. My son brought two Nerf guns, as did his friend. Between the two of them, they had about 85 Nerf darts. They spent a very happy hour playing with two of their four Nerf guns, while the other two guns sat on the picnic table or in my pocket. My son’s friend spent the entire hour lugging around a bag of extra darts that he never needed to use.
This is not an uncommon thing in our lives, or in our house, or in anyone else’s that we ever go to. Our daughter has approximately 143 stuffed animals, the majority of which sit untouched in a basket in her room. We have 4,012 markers and colored pencils, of which we use maybe 40. There are probably 28 board games in our living room cabinet, and maybe 7 of them still come out occasionally. I have clothes in my closet that I haven’t touched this entire year – and now that Christmas is coming, we will be obligated to invent things we currently don’t want in order to have something to open under the tree this year. My daughter will almost certainly ask for more stuffed animals, my son will almost certainly ask for another Nerf gun, and my wife will almost certainly want to get a couple new board games.
Maybe it’s my age (I am almost dead, after all), but I’ve started thinking more frequently about what constitutes “enough”. For most of human history, that concept wasn’t on anyone’s radar; there was never enough food, or security, or leisure. But there is now for a lot of us, and it allows us to ask a question our history hasn’t really prepared us for.
How much is enough?
You don’t have to ask that question, of course. My kids never do. They always want more ice cream, another toy, more books, more movies. I understand why they’re like that, and it’s not just because they’re kids. It’s because something in us is compelled to accumulate good things while we can to protect ourselves against the thin times that are surely coming.
I’m not certain that we’ll ever overcome that impulse, but I do think we should try to. Because there are only two things for which the answer to “How much is enough?” is always “More” – viruses, and cancer. That’s their whole thing, to grow unchecked and unrestrained until they ultimately destroy the thing that sustains them.
And ultimately, that’s what I think happens to us when we lock ourselves into a mentality of always wanting more. If you always need to save more money, then you’ll never really be happy with what you have saved; if you always need to visit more places, then you’ll always feel like you’re falling just a bit short; if you always want more followers, then you’ll always feel like fame and validation are just out of reach. It’s an insidious paradox that we are simultaneously able to have more than we ever thought possible and less than we think we should.
I’m not trying to say that we shouldn’t strive for more; after all, the desire to have more than we currently do is a large part of the reason that our species has come to dominate the planet. But I do think a lot of us are beginning to brush up against the edges of what that ambition can provide. Will another Nerf gun improve my son’s life? Will another billion dollars provide some new and important opportunity to someone who already has a billion dollars? I’m skeptical, to say the least.
So how much is enough? I don’t pretend to have an excellent answer for every situation. But I do think it’s an important question to ask occasionally. Because when you inevitably find that you actually do have enough of something, then you can afford to spend a little more energy thinking about the people who don’t have enough of it. And I definitely don’t think the world has enough of that.
