How much money is enough?

Enough may describe a practical position, or it may describe a feeling you hope a practical position will finally produce. Those two meanings deserve separate attention. You might need more resources to meet real obligations. You might also have reached a point where each achievement briefly reassures you before the finish line moves again.

Ask what you expect the next increase to let you stop doing. Worrying about necessities? Accepting treatment you dislike? Feeling inferior beside someone whose approval matters? These hopes are understandable, but money will not serve each one equally well.

You need not become indifferent to comfort or ambition. Consider whether you can name any ordinary signs of sufficiency: a decision you could make freely, a commitment you could keep, an evening you could enjoy. A number can support those experiences without becoming your only evidence that you are safe to exist.

Enough changes with circumstances, with the people who depend on you, and with the life you choose to maintain. A single permanent answer would be convenient. It would also ignore much of living.

Still, uncertainty does not prevent a provisional answer. Describe what your resources are meant to protect and make possible. Distinguish commitments already accepted from expectations you have absorbed simply by living among people who spend more. Revisit that distinction when circumstances change.

Jing asks what an increase would let you stop doing. I would also ask what continuing to pursue it requires other people to do. Does someone else carry the household while you become more secure? Can you enjoy what has already been gained together? Sufficiency includes the distribution of effort, not only its proceeds. You may reasonably seek more while deciding that the pursuit will occupy less of the life it is supposed to support.

We have a problem with the word more. It never retires. Offer it a comfortable chair and it immediately asks whether the neighbour has a more comfortable chair.

I propose interviewing Enough for the position instead. It arrives without an impressive watch and asks whether the heating works. Very suspicious. We explain that the successful applicant must inspire relentless growth. Enough explains that this appears to be a different vacancy.

More interrupts to present a five-year plan consisting of five larger versions of the current plan. Enough asks whether anyone would like lunch. The board is divided. Some directors regard lunch as a dangerous admission that a morning can be complete.

Jang wants to examine who carries the household. Excellent: appoint that person chair of the board. More has been running the company for years without once checking whether there is any food in the fridge.