Finding Enough

Finding Enough Jeff Wagner

Groundwork’s Bite-Sized Books Vol. 2 First printing, February 2020 Copyright ©2020 by Jeff Wagner All rights reserved Published by Groundwork www.layinggroundwork.org Bibliography and further resources available online at www.layinggroundwork.org/bite-sized-bibliography-2 Cover by Jordan Kump zoundsdesigns.com Printing generously donated by Where There Be Dragons wheretherebedragons.com

Introduction In 2019, I returned to the United States after teaching abroad for many years. I wanted to help address climate change at its greatest source: the country where I was born.

The situation was worse than I thought.

The typical U.S. lifestyle emits double the greenhouse gas of a Western European or Japanese lifestyle. That doesn’t count the emissions from foreign countries producing our consumer goods. Those emissions are said to belong to China, Mexico, or Vietnam.

Yet we are reluctant to change. We seem willing to address climate change only if our lives can remain how they are now.

To bring our emissions in line with other industrial nations, we must cut our consumption by half.

Government policy alone cannot do this for us. Adding solar panels to consumerism won’t solve climate 2

change; it will just create solar-powered consumerism.

True change means deep change.

This goal of this book is not to label people bad for consuming, but to pose a simple question that might help us care for the Earth: How much is enough? 

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Part 1: Forever Dreaming of More What are we working towards?

In the United States, we work very hard to increase consumption every year.

Adjusted for inflation, U.S. GDP per capita (the standard metric for defining our success as a society) today is double what it was in 1977 and more than six times what it was in 1929, when the industrial revolution’s economic boom peaked.

We have so much GDP, but what does that really mean for us? Is life in the U.S. twice as good as it was in 1977?

Are we six times happier than in the Roaring Twenties?

Is our food better tasting or more nutritious? Are we more at ease? Do we smile more? Are our lives sweeter or more full of love?

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The important things We all want to prioritize the important things that help us feel enoughness—the feeling that we have enough.

Cooking a meal for family. Spending a beautiful day outside. Treating a lover with the reverence they deserve. Supporting a community. Watching a sunset.

Stargazing.

Too often, today’s world feels tensioned to its limits, without enough space for the important things. We feel as though we can’t prioritize them. There’s no slack in the system.

In our culture of consumerism, we quickly gobble up any extra slack with a busier schedule, more screen time, or the next new purchase. We have trained ourselves to pursue happiness in the most stressful ways.

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Life is easy In Thailand, my neighbor and mentor, P’ Jon Jondai, always taught me that life is easy. At first, I didn’t believe him. Growing up in the United States, I learned the opposite: that life is a struggle.

“Life is easy” wasn’t just a piece of blind optimism or a naïve proverb. Especially in a wealthy nation like the United States, many people have more than enough material wealth to be happy. Life could be easy, but consumerism has taught us to push past moments when we feel we have enough.

Consumerism is a worldview that establishes consuming as the path to success, happiness, selfworth, and social status. Consumerism goes deeper than consumptive habits—it’s a cultural and spiritual force. By exalting consumption as the path to happiness and meaning, it binds our happiness to the destruction of the planet.

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The industrial origins of consumerism It’s popular in the United States to believe that greed and consumerism are natural. But is it true? Let’s look at a time in history when consumerism started to become what it is today.

By the 1920s, the industrial revolution totally transformed how people in the U.S. could meet their needs. But what was the industrial revolution for?

From one perspective, the goal was to invent machines to save labor. With machines improving efficiency, people could meet their needs in less time. That would mean more free time to relax, enjoy life, pursue passions, and contribute to family and society. When people had enough, they could stop working.

The United States chose a different goal in the 1920s.

When people demonstrated a tendency towards enoughness, nervous industrialists needed to awaken a desire to consume more. Without a desire for more, market forces would limit the industrialists’ fortunes.

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So they fine-tuned advertising to manipulate our desires. Production skyrocketed, and people felt the need to buy all that excess. People did not work less.

In 1937, the idea of gross domestic product (GDP) was invented to define success. Today, GDP growth remains our primary tool for measuring our society’s success.

We’ve built a strange paradox into our culture and worldview: we can only be successful if we produce and consume more than last year. Since we measure growth by percentage, success becomes a moving target that moves faster every year.

In this worldview, there is no moment of success or enoughness to arrive at. If we meet our goals for growth this year, we must push harder to grow next year. Discontent is inherent in the system. No matter how much we have, it will never be enough.

Consumerism is about making profit by manipulating desire and by controlling and exploiting how people create meaning in their lives.

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Anywhere but here Consumerism encompasses more than just material objects. Even when we’re not in a space to buy something, consumerism still makes us think that our lives could be better with something that’s not here.

Today, almost everybody carries a smartphone that constantly feeds the thought that their tiny screens might offer something better at any moment.

Looking around in public, it’s rare to find somebody who is really there to look back at you. It seems that we want to be anywhere but here.

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Enoughness When you take a deep, slow breath, it’s possible to feel that you have arrived, that you are enough. You have enough. This world is enough.

Enoughness means you feel your needs are met—you don’t need, want, or lack anything. You’ve taken control of how you see the world, and you’re not letting consumerism convince you that you lack something.

Just the possibility of enoughness refutes the core beliefs of consumerism and opens a new paradigm of thinking. In our modern world, enoughness is revolutionary, reclaiming what we lost to consumerism.

With enoughness, rather than allowing marketers to define success for us, we can create our own definitions of success. We might again source meaning from relationships with the Earth and with the people in our lives rather than feeling a need to buy meaning.

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Consumerism and enoughness are alive A culture is a living organism. It grows from the soil of our worldview and our ideas of success and purpose.

It’s rooted in the structure of our communities, our spiritual beliefs, and the physical landscapes we inhabit. It sprouts from the stories, values, and assumptions that we base our lives on.

Today, our culture is defined by consumerism, but it wasn’t always that way, so we can change it. The seeds of enoughness and consumerism are always present inside each of us, responding to the world.

We need to learn how to water the seeds of enoughness. As the teacher Thích Nhất Hạnh taught, “Sometimes your joy is the source of your smile, but sometimes your smile can be the source of your joy.”

It’s true—if you wear a smile long enough, you will feel better. We can apply this to enoughness. If we begin to act like we have enough, we might start to understand enoughness.

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Part 2: Acting Like We Have Enough You cannot buy love If consuming more made us happy, we should be living in paradise by now. Yet many people still act as though consuming more will make them happy. We even spend money we don’t have. People are deeply in debt at every level of U.S. society. Collectively in the U.S., we hold over $1 trillion in credit card debt. When our income goes up, we accelerate our spending. Many wealthy people still act like they don’t have enough.

It used to be common sense that money cannot buy any of the best things in life. You cannot buy the stars.

You cannot buy a sunset. You cannot buy love.

To act like we have enough, we might…

• cultivate the mindset that we cannot buy happiness.

• recognize how consumerism conditions us.

• build extra slack into our lives.

• consistently use extra slack to pursue the important things rather than more consumption.

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Consumerism’s conditioning is strong Imagine meeting a man in the United States who tells you that he works part-time. His relaxed life was a goal of the industrial revolution, but a common thought today is that he should contribute more to society.

Would your thoughts change if he spent his free time…

• cleaning trash out of local streams?

• teaching kids to read at the public library?

• studying climate change’s impact on ancient forests?

Consumerism’s core teaching—“life will be better with more”—guides our reaction to this man. If more is better, the natural conclusion is that people who have more must be better members of society. That’s why we applaud donations from millionaires, even if the money came from destructive means.

Consumerism’s conditioning colors our perception of the world and of each other in so many ways.

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Enough money Money is a great place to start finding enough. If we free up some money, it’s like slack that we can pull through the system to where we need it.

When we recognize that consumption doesn’t cause happiness, we can put our money where it matters. It adds up quickly. Buying a $5 fancy coffee every day adds up to almost $2,000 per year—more than some people’s monthly income!

As Paul Hawken says in the film 11th Hour, “Let’s understand that things are thieves of time because the more things you have, the more time you have to spend working to pay for them, the more your life is chained to a rhythm of perpetual purchase.”

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Enough time Working less is one of the best things we could do for the world. The world doesn’t need more GDP, more income, or more stress-induced spending.

The world needs people planting gardens, cooking home-cooked meals, and walking to work. It needs people taking the time to befriend neighbors and nurture local communities. It needs people with enough time to advocate for climate change solutions that get to the root cause of the issue: consumerism.

Remember my mentor P’ Jon Jondai? Life is easy for him because he stepped outside of consumerism and learned to create extra time.

In the U.S., things are a little different, but enoughness is possible in our society if we choose to spend time and money on what is important to us.

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Spaces that grow enoughness Walking into a space with a television or smartphone, it’s easy to feel like there’s not enough attention to go around. When one person takes out a phone, others follow, and we create an environment hostile to enoughness. We need to ensure that we have spaces where enoughness can grow.

Sitting in a peaceful forest next to a joyful stream, it’s easy to feel that we have enough. As we consume the forests, sources of enoughness are disappearing.

When we destroy a forest, we destroy a part of ourselves, and not just the part that relies on the forest for oxygen, clean water, or wood. When a peaceful forest becomes a parking lot or a joyful stream becomes a culvert, the spaces that grow enoughness disappear. Without the right environment, whether natural or human-made, we risk trapping ourselves in cycles of consumerism. Our peaceful forests are becoming warehouses for online retailers.

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Enough slowness If we allow a peaceful forest to grow, could we handle sitting in it? As lives speed up and attention spans shrink, the mental powers needed for enoughness are fading. As a people, we are out of practice.

Consumerism says: a great alternative to a gas-guzzler is an electric car, which plugs into an electrical system still primarily powered by coal.

Consumerism says: let’s replace single-use plastic with compostable corn-based plastic, replacing one kind of waste with another. Consumerism’s solutions don’t really solve the problem—they simply make us feel better about our consumption. Sometimes, we might even consume more.

We can structure life so there is time to enjoy a cup of tea with friends. Slow down. Sit down. Wash the cup.

When we have time to sit and sip the cup of tea, we have more than enough to be happy.

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Appreciating what we have Ralph Waldo Emerson once asked what would happen if the stars appeared only once every thousand years.

The overwhelming beauty of that night would inspire reverence, poetry, and ecstatic joy. Could there ever be enough love poems written for the stars?

Consumerism prevents us from seeing beauty in the stars. Enoughness allows us to appreciate the beauty around us. That’s true wealth: joy and appreciation.

The stars are still there every night, waiting to remind us that we have enough. Gazing at the stars, I don’t feel that my life would be better if I had a faster data connection on my cell phone. 

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Part 3: Fostering Enoughness in the World Enough to give Enoughness is not just a way of feeling good in a consumerist world. It’s a crack in the foundation of consumerism that allows us to see an alternative way of creating meaning.

We might find meaning in non-consumptive ways by…

• devoting more care and attention to the relationships that bring us meaning. Do you really give enough time for your lover, your family, your friends, your elders, or the Earth?

• seeking the tasks that the world needs done, but that don’t pay anything.

• shifting the question from “how much can I get?” to “how much can I give?”

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Sharing enoughness Finding enough for ourselves may bring joy, but it is only a beginning. If consumerism persists like it is now, it will destroy our sources of enoughness.

In our society, we often build our relationships around consumption. If we cannot consume together, we may not know how to relate to each other. It’s easier to get lost together in consumption than to take the time to listen and build relationships based on understanding.

It’s important to understand enoughness within ourselves, and also to share enoughness with those around us. It’s much easier for us to change when we have friends to change with. Society can evolve when change comes from a place of joy and positivity rather than a feeling of lack or scarcity.

Enoughness is a way to experience and share joy. To address the deeper causes of climate change, we must build a culture from the ground up that knows how to find meaning in places other than consumption.

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Pushing past moments of enoughness Remember the choice to work less or consume more that followed the industrial revolution? We can imagine the industrial 1920s as a baseline for enoughness because so much is similar to today: electric lights, recorded music, washing machines, cars, and telephones.

But we could have stopped at any time. Dreaming of more pushed us past many moments of enoughness in history. It drove European conquest and colonialism.

The Cold War, Operation Condor, and the Vietnam War were all to protect the dreams of more. Today, that dream pushes us to buy the latest gadget. Through it all, people have struggled to ďŹ nd happiness, joy, and meaning. No matter how much we have, we’re still the same.

Every moment continues to present a choice for us. We can choose to believe that we have enough or choose to believe that having more will lead to happiness. 

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What is the most beautiful way you can live?

At some point, we will need to replace our dreams of more. We need to redefine ourselves.

One clear fall day in Bolivia, a guest spoke to my students about the economics of international development. She laid out a colorful hand-woven cloth, made a circle of fresh flowers, and began her talk by asking, “What is the most beautiful way you can live?”

Softly, she explained Andean philosophy and the idea of vivir bien or buen vivir: to live well. Living well, she said, involves uncommon beauty. If wood for your house was cut from a forest that was not replanted, your house is not beautiful. If your fancy shirt was sewn in a sweatshop, your shirt is not beautiful.

When we replace the world of consumerism, we allow the possibility to ask what is enough for the earth, for other peoples, for the rivers, forests, plants, and animals. Enoughness can help people to live beautifully.

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Enough.

As James Baldwin wrote, “The sad thing is that the American way of life has failed to make people happier or better. We do not want to admit this.” The path of consumerism has not led where it promised. After all the damage it has done to our world, we are still right where we started, feeling that we don’t have enough.

Consumerism is pushing our world towards irreversible climate change. Maintaining consumerism seems to be a goal of many proposed climate solutions. Let’s leave consumerism behind.

Enoughness is not a destination, but a way of seeing the world and moving through life. We don’t need to wait—we can find enough on any step on the path.

Remember…

I am enough. I have enough. This world is beautiful. This world is enough.

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