Possibly Delusional Yearnings
On the weird-ass moment we’re all occupying. And how inhumane it’s making everything feel. On quiet yearnings. On enoughness.
Longing for “just enoughness”
Scene: A group of friends gathered around a campfire talking about what they would do if they weren’t constrained by… well, the need to make money.
Context: One of us just did this smart thing where you leave a job because you are tired, uninspired, and unmotivated. A tech company, amidst a major tech sector cooling no less. So it’s also a brave thing. We’re all proud of our friend. It’s a much-needed reset after years of intensity which included hyper-growth and an IPO.
In ideating all the things he could do, none of his ideas touched on anything even remotely connected to tech. Not a single idea started with „I just really want to build a billion-dollar company”. Not even a „million-dollar company”. There was no desire to harness the „power of tech for humanity’s progress”. There was no „scaling” or „growth”. No mention of crypto, generative AI, or “network effect”.
The ideas were simple. Salt of the earth simple. To have a pub. To have a bookstore. To have a coffee shop with only 3 types of beverages. To serve each beverage with a beignet. Because beignets are the best. To know his customers. As in know their names and the names of their pets, and kids. To have regulars. To be part of a neighborhood “high street” (can you tell he’s British?) To be part of a community.
And then the rest of us (all neck-deep in tech as well) started ideating what we would each do if money wasn’t a consideration. A wine store. A pizza joint. A meditation studio. No one was particularly interested in making sure the businesses were profitable. The two constant criteria seemingly: doing something that doesn’t feel like work and making just enough money.
Why did we suddenly envision ourselves doing work we never before pursued as a realistic path? Does anyone ever graduate high school or go off to college with the goal of “running a small business” on a “small high street”? Are those ideas a kind of mirage? Are they refractions of a life un-lived? What does it say about us as a civilization, that “just enoughness” is what we now long for?
Freddie DeBoer wrote in a fantastic essay on things we mistake for progress to feels related:
“(…) You send an email a large language model wrote for you to spare yourself a minute of mental activity at the end of a long day working from home driven by Adderall you got via Zoom from a pill-mill doctor, you order dinner through an app (so that you don’t have to talk to an actual person on the phone), masturbate to online porn, watch several dozen videos on YouTube, none of which you’ll remember even three days later, then take two Xanax to put yourself to sleep. That’s progress now, the steady accumulation of various tools to avoid other human beings, leaving people free to consume #content that is by design totally, existentially disposable, throw-away culture that asks nothing of us and which we don’t remember because neither creator nor audience wants to invest enough for remembering to make sense.”
Unique value props of humans
What do these quiet inklings, shared in a moment of deep connection, suggest about the mental space we are all occupying? Where is this wholesomeness coming from?
Why do we suddenly all share a desire to go back to the basics of commerce and value exchange? Is it a life stage moment or a generational moment? Why are we all seemingly yearning for the same thing? And what is it that we’re actually yearning for?
Maybe we’re all craving work we can actually understand. Like at the basic-most level. Maybe we’re chasing meaning in the mundane. Maybe - in the age of zoom meetings - we’re missing real human connection. Having someone stand right in front of us, living, breathing, asking for a coffee, and a beignet - gives us a taste of what it means to actually touch another life. Or maybe this is an outcome of the tectonic shifts in the labor market and the massive reckoning with AI advancements. “Full-time jobs” are no longer totems of safety. Knowledge work or creativity is no longer a unique value proposition of humanity.
I think we’re chasing a yearning for work that is simple, slow, steady. Work that has a lot of “salt of earthiness”. A pre-modern version of commerce - an exchange of value for the purpose of sustaining relationships and fostering community. Work as a pursuit of human connection. Businesses not optimized for growth, speed, or efficiency.
Ultimate luxury in 2023
A few weeks ago, I co-led a conversation about the emotional messiness of money as part of the Startupy community. One of the main threads that emerged in the discussion was coincidentally also the notion of “enoughness”.
Someone asked: “How much money is enough to feel like you’re living a rich life?” People of all backgrounds described their definitions of “rich life” and surprisingly (or not!) none of them had anything to do with material possessions. Signifiers of „richness” included meaning, creative pursuits, community, giving back… And the most reliable signifier of having „made it”, which everyone agreed with, was the freedom of time. One person’s response really hit me: “I realized I was making enough when I stopped turning on my alarm clock.”
We’ve become a culture that equates time, spaciousness, and capacity with ultimate luxury. What if we turned off that alarm clock even before we felt like we’d made it?
The Practice
As I’m about to move 100 km away from the metropolis that taught me everything I know about hustle and grind, into an actual farm town, I’m left wondering how much of my next chapter will be defined by finding my own version of “just enoughness”.
Some questions to explore:
What does the idea of “just enoughness” bring up for me?
What stories do I tell myself about “just enoughness”?
What role models of “enoughness” have I seen in different areas of my life?
Where could I create a sense of “enoughness” today?
What would designing a life around the idea of “just enoughness” in the pursuit of time, capacity, and spaciousness look like?
What about time, capacity, and spaciousness scares me?
Provocations like this - whether explores as a journaling prompt or quiet reflection or a conversation with someone you trust - build your self-reflection muscle. Little by little, you’re rewiring your brain to bring the unconscious stuff up to the surface. Little by little, the unconscious becomes conscious.
Over time, these little excavations build up to larger epiphanies. If you stumble into one - send me a note and let me know what surfaced for you. I’d love to hear your ahas!
Random collection of things
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earlier this week wrote about the “mediocre man”, some parts of that essay relate to the yearning for “just enoughness” I’m sensing in the zeitgest.“In today’s world, almost everyone blindly embraces an ethic of “hard work.” But what they are really doing is embracing an ethic of extreme effort. Today’s problems that we struggle with are increasingly not effort problems but imagination and ingenuity problems. They don’t require more bodies and hustle but steady mediocre work that involves rest, contemplation, and ease.“
🤘
of Startupy wrote a bunch of crisply articulated thoughts about many things that I also think / write about but never ever manage to articulate as well as she did. Best thing I stumbled on the internet in the past couple of weeks.☯ An introduction to the idea of non-duality, which is a very difficult concept to grasp (and a big part of my meditation teacher training!) This piece does a great job of simplifying and explaining it, and offers a solid collection of different entry points into practicing non-duality. You don’t have to be all crunchy and woo woo and a Buddha to find something in here that will resonate.
💣 Powerful essay from
(who self-describes as “cool but rude” which is the greatest three-word bio that tells you everything without telling you anything) that I quoted above. I’m adding it here so that you actually read it. It’s about what the current lack of regulation of tech companies does to our kids, our culture, and our sense of humanity. And how we’re really failing at addressing it. The essay is really well-written, accurate, and measured. And it’s really fucking scary.👯♀️ A while ago, I realized I wanted to find more of “my people”. People who would be into stuff I’m into. Who would get me. Who would be geeking out on the same stuff or inspiring me in new ways. Stumbling into a newish collective, that published an amazing zine on the “New Creative Era” and is fueling a rise of “Release Clubs”, pulled on all of my heart’s strings. Like I have no time for this, but I will make time to get to know whoever is behind this.
"You can be relaxed and dedicated. Just because you worry more, doesn't mean you care more."
- James Clear