Enough

"Enough" is one of my favorite concepts and I think it hugely under-utilized.  "Enough" is an easy concept in certain situations, such as eating enough to be healthy, but more complicated in other situations, such as trying hard enough. 

In the simple cases I think it comes down to a tipping point, to little food and you will be unhealthy, too much food and you will be unhealthy, enough food is the Goldilocks zone in the middle.  Other tipping points can be where usefulness stops.  If you want to have a successful career in business then at some point further schooling in business has no real effect other than to delay your start in business.

Then there come situations in which what is enough becomes murky.  What is enough money?  What is enough love?  What is good enough?

In the United states the poverty line, the basic definition of not enough, runs at about $23,000 a year for a family of four.  In a descending list of median household incomes by country the first country to have a number below that of the US poverty line is Italy, in 19th place.  According to the US government, slightly more than half of all Italians don't have enough money. According to the Italians, 16% of their population lives below the poverty line. What is enough money?

If you, as I do, think that money is for providing happiness, then enough money is the amount of money needed to produce happiness over which money makes no difference, or at least less difference than putting resources into anther area of your life.  The biggest jump in happiness quite reasonably happens when you go from not having your basic needs met, to having them met.  Sick, homeless, hungry frightened people are much less happy than well, housed, fed, safe people.  Does this mean that having your basic needs met is enough money?  Yes if you are a Buddhist, o if you are a regular person.

Happiness has been correlated with income, but only to a point.  In the US any correlation between happiness and money stops somewhere around $100,000.  Is this enough money?   Well, after a certain point what seems to matter with happiness and income is whether you make a similar or different amount to your neighbors.  If you make $50,000 and your neighbor makes $60,000 you will probably be less happy than a person who makes $50,000 whose neighbors make $40,000. So, enough money is pretty much a bit more than getting your basic needs met and around the same amount as the people around you, which is why Costa Rica is one of the happier places in the world.

What is enough love?  Somewhere between not feeling that you are missing something and needing a little breathing room?

What is being a good enough person?

Why am I even talking about this concept?  I am sure that I have said all of this before.  I am talking about "enough" because of an interesting piece of information I found out today.  The happiest country in the world is Australia, or Denmark, or Costa Rica.  It depends on which measure you use.  If you just ask people if they are happy then Denmark wins.  If you factor in a bunch of economic indicators then Australia wins.  If you add in environmental factors then Costa Rica wins.  The idea seems to be prevalent that having enough to be happy isn't enough to be happy,   It is inconceivable to many that Bhutan could be a happier place than Australia, just look how poor they are!

"Enough" will matter more in the long run.  As technology increasingly replaces people then our present cultural and economic model of the necessity of a full time job in a house will no longer be feasible.  Eventually the number of jobs at which humans outperform machines will be substantially less than half of the population.  Unemployment will become the norm rather than a crisis.  With most people having no kids at home and no job, "enough" becomes a far more important concept than "more."

An economy based on providing enough for everyone is not a growing economy, it doesn't need to be.  It is only very recently that there has been enough money for people some areas, and the twentieth century was ideologically largely about a battle between different methods of making more money, and capitalism won.  However, in a few years there are going to be large areas of the globe with enough money, and not much for people to usefully do.  Such a position is incompatible with a capitalist system.  At some point in the future, and much closer than I think people realize, there will have to be a mainstream change in how we view society, something moving from money, work, competition to satisfaction, happiness, community.

At some point "enough" will have to be recognized as actually enough.  This is a good thing.  If right now you are here, right now, and you recognize that you have enough, it is actually quite hard not to be happy......enough.