Embedded Files
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.
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
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
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."
"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
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
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
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.
"All the true vows are secret vows. The ones we speak out loud are the ones we break."
-JOHN O'DONOHUE
What's the goal?
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
A setback
A large asset of mine has declined in value by a bit more than 20% over the past six months. My anxiety has kicked in big time, spinning stories about having to work very hard to make up for the losses - to add more to my balance sheet. It seems that life is asking me to put my money where my mouth is. My deeper wisdom says, “You can trust you’ll be financially just fine – you're willing to be flexible with some of your discretionary spending, and if really necessary, you could easily earn some consulting income. Relax with less. Simply, relax with less.” No one has to suffer major downturns in asset values to participate in the Enough Project. But when those losses occur (or even if they’re just feared), we have a new opportunity to find our way to ‘enough’ in the new normal, or we’ll inevitably go back into our habits of accumulation and preservation.
Quiet work
Quiet work
I tell myself to 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.
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