I was catching up with my friend Jeff Ong. He shared the following quote:

At a party given by a billionaire on Shelter Island, Kurt Vonnegut informs his pal, Joseph Heller, that their host, a hedge fund manager, had made more money in a single day than Heller had earned from his wildly popular novel Catch-22 over its whole history. Heller responds, “Yes, but I have something he will never have … enough.” Enough. I was stunned by the simple eloquence of that word—stunned for two reasons: first, because I have been given so much in my own life and, second, because Joseph Heller couldn’t have been more accurate. For a critical element of our society, including many of the wealthiest and most powerful among us, there seems to be no limit today on what enough entails.

My response:

Yeah, but how much is enough?!??!? 

And that’s the rub. That’s the really tricky bit. How does one figure out how much is enough?

I don’t have an answer, but I wish I did.

Related

Is it weird that the average work week is 5 days per week, 8 hours per day, and that most everyone just sort of falls in line with this willingly, no questions asked?

When I worked at WildBit, they had a 4 day work week and I remember it always just felt off. Something about it didn’t feel quite right. I should have loved it. But I didn’t.

That “work 5 days per week” is almost hard wired into us.

Again, I don’t have the answer here.

AI

If AI becomes sentient and makes it so that no human has to work, do you think people will be more happy?

I doubt it.

But maybe that’s the sneaky way they get rid of us. AI doesn’t need to destroy us. It will just liberate us from work and we’ll end up destroying ourselves.

I choose work

I had the pleasure of taking a 3 month sabbatical at the end of last year. One of the things I realized is that for the previous 20 years I had fantasized about retiring. But having experienced a “mini retirement”, I can now confidently say that I will never stop working. It’s just not in me.

Enough with the ADHD – Bring it together

So yeah, this Vonnegut quote really gets at something deep – what does it actually mean to have enough in life? Money and status are all well and good, but they don’t seem to fully scratch that itch of feeling fulfilled and content.

Whether it’s being weirded out by 4-day workweeks, daydreaming about early retirement, or wondering if AI will just straight up make human labor obsolete…all these things tie back to that core question of how much is really enough? How much work, how much success, how much meaning do we need to feel at peace?

The answer is going to be different for everyone of course. We all have internalized narratives about what “enough” looks like based on society’s expectations. But maybe the true luxury is giving ourselves permission to redefine what it means for ourselves.

To work hard, but also TRULY rest. To chase purpose and relationships over blind ambition. To know when to be satisfied instead of always craving more. Heller seemed to grasp that having an inner sense of enough is rare and precious, especially in a world that relentlessly sells us on scarcity.

At the end of the day, maybe that’s the real wealth and the real definition of enough – just being happy with what you have. Nothing more. Nothing less. Not as simple as it sounds though, is it?

But, it’s something I’m personally striving for.