Enough Project Insights
I’m Brent, the co-founder of The Enough Project. As I began exploring ‘enough’ in my own life a few years ago, I kept a journal that quickly got quite long. This document shares some key insights from that journal. Given this is a collection of excerpts, my apologies in advance for any abrupt transitions.
The Health Scare
"I didn’t want to tell you before I got the biopsy results, but given I’ve never seen a mass like yours present in the gumline in my 35 years of oral surgery, I was very nervous you had an incurable sarcoma.” So went the post-op consultation a month after my 52nd birthday and two weeks before COVID-19 sent most of the world into isolation.
The prior summer, I’d gone on a meditation retreat and had come to a deeply felt intuition that increasing my consumption was truly a hedonic treadmill. Although I hadn’t heard the term, I knew that the needs and feelings of boredom and emptiness that underlie my impulses to travel, purchase, and even be generous were being fed for increasingly short amounts of time. I wanted to level off our consumption, at a minimum, if not dial it back.
Habits vs Well-Being
I’d done a simple financial projection about a year back that showed me that our net worth would likely expand by about five-fold over the next fifteen years. I remember the feeling of looking at that number at my age 65 – five times the amount we have today – I felt my pulse quicken and my breath get shallow (in a good way)!
But the almost-sarcoma had punctuated the sentence of my life in a new way. It caused me to see more honestly the diminishing returns of each higher rung on the hedonic ladder, the shortening of the remainder of my life, and the realization that our financial resources could either go to consumption or impact (whether through philanthropy or impact investing), but not both.
This shit takes stamina. I hear the traditional capitalist point of view in my mind: ‘Don’t give up flexibility, abundance, choice, luxury, future generosity or inheritance for my kids and future grandkids.’ But as I write those words, I also notice in my heart a narrowing of my inner sense of aliveness, mystery, creativity, and love. From Arthur Brooks: “Yet even if you recognize all this, getting off the treadmill is hard. It feels dangerous. Our urge for more is quite powerful, but stronger still is our resistance to less. That’s one of the insights that earned Princeton’s Daniel Kahneman the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics, for work he did with the late Stanford psychologist Amos Tversky.”
"The pain I shrink from, that I don't want to fully feel, is what I view as my inherent, intrinsic unlovablity... to fathers, to lovers. Unless I do cool shit, give a lot, achieve beyond compare, and impress, I'm alone, hungry, afraid and hopeless."
You're going to be OKAY
When I was 23 (over 30 years ago), the Dalai Lama took my hands in his, gazed more deeply into my eyes than I thought was possible between two separate living things, and ‘said’ with his baritone guttural giggle “Everything is going to be so absolutely okay, you have no idea.” I got chills down my spine, my eyes became moist. My deepest insecurities, vulnerabilities, and self-doubt had met their match...more than their match. They would return, a thousand, no, tens of thousands of times again. But this was a resonant truth. What would my personal enough project look like if guided by this presence, this certainty that everything is and always will be okay?
Worst-case Scenarios
Given my propensity for anxiety, I fear that if our net wealth dropped by much more than 25%, I’d be very nervous. But would I? Or would I trust that my abilities to overcome adversity, to earn income, to reduce lifestyle spending, and to add value to other people could always get me through? Might I see that hanging onto those assets is actually a form of deadweight that dulls my aliveness? I can feel my somatic inheritance of “save at all costs” pulsing in my flesh. But that’s not who I want to be, here, now. I’m willing to risk some of our lifestyle. I want to unpeel the layers of false security.
The Present or the Future
I can always convince myself that accomplishing something improves my long-term quality of life – “wouldn't life be amazing when....” But what about now, this next hour, this afternoon? What serves my quality of life right now? I feel my heart warming and softening as I ask this question on the page – a warm, radiant glow spreading out from my solar plexus (also the epicenter of my worst anxiety sensations since I was 30 years old.)
I’ve been equating making more money with doing a lot of good and burning myself out in the name of ‘more money = more impact.’ I’ve come to the realization that sacrificing health, vitality, and inner balance for that end isn’t sustainable.
What's the goal?
I’ve now spent another 8 hours or so running financial planning scenarios. Having run the numbers with very conservative assumptions around future earnings and investment returns, we can still afford to donate much more than I ever would’ve thought to philanthropy in the coming years. But should I be solving for how much giving? I don't feel that’s the answer. Perhaps I’m only trying to maximize my philanthropy to get others’ approval, which might in fact be the same ‘not enough’ voice that I’ve applied to financial security my whole life? In trying to maximize lifetime giving, I feel too much motivation to work harder, get more done, have a greater impact, etc. When will ‘enough’ include all my forms of striving? I’m realizing this inner emotional work is never ‘done.’ Voices of “not enough” seem to surface in different aspects of my life, calling me to question how much is enough time, social media love, exercise, eating, or travel.
A setback
Several partners and employees of Abacus, one of the companies I co-founded, had different visions for what a wealth management firm ought to look like. Abacus had been the first-ever financial advisory firm to be certified as a B-corp (in 2007), and had stood for a triple bottom line management style and investment approach for over 20 years. Even though it was best for the company’s mission and stakeholders, these departures would reduce our income by about 50% and the value of our largest asset by 20-30%. My anxiety has kicked in big time, spinning stories about having to work very hard to get profits back up to where they were. It seems that life is asking me to put my money where my mouth is. My reactive instinct is to fight to keep these other partners, to sell them on how valuable our vision of alleviating suffering while investing for financial gain is and will be. But my deeper wisdom says “You’ve been suffering greatly from this misalignment for years, and this is self-care at work. You can trust you’ll be financially just fine – look at the track record – any time you’ve moved from a spirit of ‘enough’ or been more generous, things have worked out so much better than you could’ve predicted. Relax with less. Simply, relax with less. That’s the mantra for this time.” No one has to lose major portions of their wealth to participate in the Enough Project. But when those losses occur (or even if they’re just feared), we must find our way to ‘enough’ in the new normal or we’ll inevitably go back into our habits of accumulation and preservation.
Take the mental audiences out of this. Don’t do this work with people in mind who I want to impress, whether with how much net worth we’re going to have, or how much we’re going to give to charity. Quiet embers need protection from the winds of public attention.
"All the true vows are secret vows. The ones we speak out loud are the ones we break."
-JOHN O'DONOHUE
About Brent
Brent Kessel co-founded Abacus Wealth Partners, a values-aligned financial planning firm, as well as Align Impact, an impact investment advisor to family offices and foundations, and in early 2022, transitioned out of the Abacus CEO role. Brent has been meditating and practicing yoga since 2004 and 1992 respectively.
Brent’s present focus is the Enough Project, which curates a community of fortunate people who wish to use their excess resources to positively impact some of the world’s most pressing problems. The Enough Project invites high net wealth individuals and families to engage in a brave conversation about wealth, human capital, impact and well-being. Modern culture applauds consumption, accumulation, and career maximization, tendencies which can be based on a sense of emotional insecurity, obligation to others, or simply unquestioned lifelong habits. For Enough Project participants, these financial imperatives have lost some of their allure, and there’s a hunger for more meaning, purpose, equity, andeffectiveness with their financial and human capital. Participants learn how to apply their surplus resources to make an outsized contribution to tackling the world's most pressing problems, which paradoxically creates greater well-being for them personally at the same time.
Brent Kessel is an employee and partner at Abacus Wealth Partners, LLC (“Abacus ”). The material presented here consists solely of Brent's perspectives, experience and opinions, is intended for general information purposes only, and doesn't represent official advice from nor marketing for Abacus. No portion of the presentation serves as the receipt of, or as a substitute for, personalized investment advice from Abacus or any other investment professional of your choosing.