What Is ‘Enough’?
What you don’t miss tells you as much about yourself as what you do
For years I’ve been obsessed with the concept of “enough,” and figuring out what that meant for me. How much do my wife and I need to spend at restaurants each month? How many biscuit joiners are too many biscuit joiners? Should we put on a deck? Would a second banjo be “indulgent”?
Right now, these questions feel particularly urgent: What is the bare minimum that we need to be happy? What can I throw out?
Until the pandemic, paring down felt more like a privileged exercise than a necessity. Sure, my wife and I could have quit our habit of going to see live music three or four times a month, at almost $400 each time ($50 ticket in tickets, $100 in babysitting, $125 in food and drink, $100 Uber). Despite the significant costs, I didn’t want to give that up. It was too important to us.
As isolation and crisis have reordered the priorities of people around the world, my colleague Amy Shearn recently came up with a useful thought experiment: Take stock of what you miss as a way of understanding what you actually value. It’s a great diagnostic, and I found myself asking the opposite too: What do I NOT miss that much?
Live music, it turns out. Two months after seeing Calexico (great show!), I know that I…
