Enough

I. The Blueprint

"Enough" is not a feeling. It is an architectural property.

This is the thing we keep missing when we ask ourselves why we cannot seem to stop. We treat insufficiency as a moral failing, as if wanting more were a defect of character that could be corrected by meditation or decluttering or reading the Stoics. But you cannot meditate your way to a destination that has been removed from the map. You cannot declutter your way to a finish line that no longer exists.

The word itself remembers what we forgot. According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, "enough" descends from the Old English genog, which traces through Proto-Germanic to the root nek- — meaning "to reach, to attain."⁵ The prefix ge- carried a sense of completion, of perfection in the original sense: something finished, done. The word pointed at arrival. It assumed you could get somewhere.

I want to suggest that "enough" requires a blueprint — not metaphorically, but structurally. For the concept to cohere, three things must be in place:

First, an endpoint. Enough for what? The word only makes sense if there is a destination. Enough grain for winter. Enough money for a house. Enough labour for salvation. Without a defined purpose, sufficiency has nothing to be sufficient to.

Second, a metric. How would you know when you'd arrived? Some way of measuring whether you'd reached the endpoint. A binary assessment: sufficient, or not yet. The question "Do I have enough?" must be answerable.

Third, a reason to stop. Even if you've arrived, even if you can measure it, why would you cease? There must be some force — theological, social, legal, psychological — that makes continuation pointless or shameful or forbidden.

This is not philosophy. This is load-bearing structure. Remove any one of these, and "enough" collapses from a coherent concept into a vague aspiration. You can want it all you like. The question is whether it computes.

The etymology told us this from the beginning. Nek-: to reach, to attain. The root assumed arrival was possible. The architecture was in the language all along. We just stopped building what the word described.

II. The Demolition

We did not lose "enough" in a single catastrophe. We dismantled it beam by beam across five centuries, until the building was gone and only the word remained — pointing at nothing, remembering something.

The endpoint dissolved.

The Greeks had pleonexia — the condition of wanting more than one's share.¹¹ It was considered a vice, like cowardice. Aristotle, in his Politics, drew a distinction so clean you can cut yourself on it: oikonomia, the art of household management, securing what you need for a good life; and chrematistics, the accumulation of wealth without limit.¹ The first was natural, bounded, purposeful. The second was "unnatural" — a word he used deliberately to describe money breeding money, wealth becoming its own endpoint.

For over a thousand years, the Church held this line. Usury was malum in se — evil in itself. Lending at interest was forbidden not because of consequences but because it violated the proper order of things. Dante placed usurers among those who committed violence against God, Nature, and Art—grouped with blasphemers—while murderers occupied a different ring of the same circle. The endpoint was clear: enough for a good life, no more.

Then the Reformation cracked the ceiling. Martin Luther maintained the medieval prohibition on interest-bearing loans throughout his life, permitting only a narrow exception for Zinskauf (rental income purchase), which he did not classify as lending in the strict sense. John Calvin went further, approving loans at interest for business purposes.¹³ By the time the UK repealed its usury laws in 1854 — though even then, pawnbroking retained separate limits — the endpoint had been replaced by a horizon. Not "enough for what?" but "more than before."

The metric shifted.

"Enough" used to be binary. Enough grain for winter, or not. Enough dowry for marriage, or not. These were questions with answers.

In 1934, the Department of Commerce submitted to the U.S. Senate the first comprehensive national income estimates, a study directed by economist Simon Kuznets.⁹ This work would eventually evolve into our modern GDP framework. He warned, explicitly, that "the welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred from a measurement of national income." By the mid-twentieth century, national income accounting had become the primary way nations measured economic success. The metric was no longer sufficiency but growth — not a binary but a continuous function, measured not against a standard but against itself last year. There is no point on the GDP curve labeled "enough." There is only "more" or "less than before."

Kate Raworth, in Doughnut Economics, gave us a picture of what a ceiling might look like — the ecological limits that define "too much."¹² What she didn't trace was when we lost the last one.

The reason to stop disappeared.

Max Weber, in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, saw something in the Protestant transformation: a psychological revolution.¹⁴ Calvinist theology, with its terrifying doctrine of predestination, created an impossible bind. You couldn't know if you were saved. You couldn't earn salvation. But you could look for signs — and worldly success began to look like evidence of divine favour. Work became not a means to an end but a calling, a proof of election. To stop working was to doubt your salvation.

I should note that Weber's thesis hasn't held up entirely. Historians have pointed out that capitalism sometimes preceded Calvinism, sometimes lagged by too long to suggest causality. The story is probably too neat. But something happened in those centuries. The reason to stop — the theological accounting that made continuation pointless — was replaced by an infinite horizon. There was no final judgement that would arrive to tally the books. There was only more time, and the compounding anxiety of never being sure.

Endpoint. Metric. Reason to stop. The three-part architecture that made "enough" computable.

We demolished them systematically. One by one. And called it progress.

III. The Treadmill

In 1930, John Maynard Keynes sat down to imagine the future. He was in an optimistic mood — or trying to be. The Depression had just begun, but Keynes looked past it, a hundred years forward, to what he called "the economic possibilities for our grandchildren."⁷

His prediction: we would be rich beyond imagining. The standard of life in progressive countries would multiply by four to eight times. The "economic problem" — humanity's ancient struggle for subsistence — would be solved. "Three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week may put off the problem for a great while," he wrote. "For three hours a day is quite enough to satisfy the old Adam in most of us!"

I love that exclamation point. Keynes was genuinely excited. He thought we would need to learn "the art of life itself."

Here is what happened instead: living standards rose exactly as Keynes predicted. Real GDP per capita in developed countries is four to eight times what it was in 1930. And we work, on average, 34 to 37 hours a week. Not 15. Not even close.

We solved the production problem. We did not solve the architecture problem. The treadmill has no endpoint, no metric for arrival, no reason to step off. You can run four times as fast and still be running.

In 1971, psychologists Philip Brickman and Donald Campbell coined a term for this: the "hedonic treadmill."² In 1978, Brickman and colleagues studied lottery winners — people who had received sudden, massive windfalls — and found them no happier than controls.³ More strikingly, they took "significantly less pleasure from a series of mundane events." The windfall raised the baseline. Everything else seemed smaller by comparison.

We adapt. We recalibrate. We run.

Richard Easterlin, in 1974, documented the paradox that bears his name: within any country, at any moment, richer people are happier than poorer people.⁴ But over time, as average incomes rise, average happiness does not. We are on a treadmill that moves as we move.

In 2023, a team including Daniel Kahneman tried to resolve the puzzle.⁸ What they found is nuanced: for most people, more money keeps buying marginal happiness, even at high levels. But for the unhappiest twenty percent — those already suffering from heartbreak, depression, bereavement — money stops helping after about $100,000 a year. You cannot buy your way out of certain forms of misery.

Which is to say: if you're already running, you can run incrementally faster forever. There is no finish line. The architecture that would define one was demolished.

I find this almost too painful to contemplate, so naturally I've been contemplating it for months. What it means to be a species that removed arrival from our vocabulary. That built systems optimized for perpetual motion and called it freedom.

IV. The Other Maps

I don't want to romanticise other cultures or other times. Every society has its violences, its failures, its ways of making people miserable. Noble savage narratives are lazy and patronising. I am not selling tickets to an Eden that never existed.

But I do want to notice: there have been systems with blueprints that included ceilings. And what that means — the only thing it needs to mean — is that the architecture is possible. We are not doomed by biology. The treadmill is not in our DNA. It is something we built, and what we built, we can — in principle — unbuild.

In 1925, the sociologist Marcel Mauss published The Gift, an essay on what he called "gift economies" — systems where wealth circulated rather than accumulated.¹⁰ The obligations were threefold: to give, to receive, and to reciprocate. In the potlatch ceremonies of the Pacific Northwest, status was negotiated not through hoarding but through giving away. The more you gave, the higher your standing.

Mauss was not naive. He understood these systems had their own hierarchies, their own coercions. But they had one thing our system lacks: a structural ceiling. At some point, you had to give it away. There was no endpoint where you had accumulated "enough" because accumulation was not the point.

In 1972, the fourth king of Bhutan, Jigme Singye Wangchuck, introduced the concept that Gross National Happiness matters more than Gross Domestic Product.⁶ The country developed an alternative metric — nine domains including psychological wellbeing, time use, community vitality, ecological resilience. A citizen is classified as "happy" if they achieve sufficiency in at least 66% of the weighted indicators across these domains.

Note the structure. There is a ceiling built into the metric. It is possible to reach it. You can be happy enough.

It has not created a utopia. Bhutan has its own problems. But it is an existence proof. Another way of counting is possible. Another architecture can be drawn.

These alternative maps all contain what we removed: an endpoint you can reach, a metric that tells you when you've arrived, a reason that continuation makes no sense. The three-part architecture. The blueprint that makes "enough" computable.

They remembered what the etymology knew.

V. The Return

So: can we recover the blueprint?

I don't know. That's the honest answer. I don't know if a civilisation that has spent five centuries dismantling its ceilings can remember what ceilings were for. I don't know if the treadmill can be stopped while we're still running on it. I don't know if "enough" can mean anything again in a system designed to make the question unanswerable.

But I know this: the architecture was in the language all along.

Nek-. To reach, to attain. The root that assumed arrival was possible. That sufficiency was a place, not a feeling. That you could get somewhere.

The three-part blueprint I laid out in Section I — endpoint, metric, reason to stop — that wasn't a modern framework. That was the structure the word has always pointed to. The etymology remembered what we demolished.

When Aristotle distinguished oikonomia from chrematistics, he was describing an endpoint: wealth for a good life, not wealth for wealth. When medieval scholars condemned usury, they were enforcing a reason to stop: money breeding money violated the natural order. When farmers measured grain for winter, they were using a metric: enough, or not yet.

The blueprint existed. We dismantled it. And the word kept pointing at the empty space where the building used to stand.

What would it take to rebuild the architecture?

This is not a rhetorical question. It is a structural one. If you wanted "enough" to be computable again, you would need something that defines what you're heading toward. Something that tells you when you've arrived. Something that makes continuation pointless.

The Greeks had it. The medieval Church had it. Bhutan has a version of it. We had it, once — before we dismantled it in the name of freedom, in the name of growth, in the name of an infinite horizon that turned out to be a treadmill.

We cannot meditate our way there. We cannot declutter our way there. We cannot want our way to a destination that has been removed from the coordinates. The self-help framing — that you can achieve "enough" through personal practice — is not wrong. It is structurally impossible. It is asking you to navigate to a city that no longer exists on the map.

But the etymology knows where the city was. Nek-. To reach. The root that assumes arrival is possible.

And if arrival was possible once — if "enough" was computable for four thousand years across dozens of cultures — then the impossibility we feel is not biological inevitability. It is architectural failure.

We demolished the structure. The structure can be rebuilt.

I am not going to tell you how. I don't do prescriptions. There is no action item at the end of this essay that will restore the blueprint. The problem is not something a to-do list can solve.

But I can leave you with what the word remembers. That the architecture existed. That we knew how to build it. That arrival was once the assumption, not the impossibility.

We have been running for a very long time now. We are very good at running. We have built systems of exquisite sophistication that generate the sensation of progress while the horizon retreats.

But the word is still in the language. Nek-. To reach, to attain. Still pointing at where the destination used to be. Still remembering what made arrival possible.

The blueprint was demolished. The blueprint was not lost.

Enough.