How much is enough

The vexing problem of modern life

What does enough mean?

Last weekend, I plowed through Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s latest book Long Island Compromise (Amazon affiliate link). She’s a writer’s writer: half the time, I was caught up in the story, and the other half, I was stopping to figure out how she did things. She would drop a line in one chapter, then get back to it several chapters later.

The story is about a family that has great wealth but also great trauma: a family member had been kidnapped for ransom several years before. The question at the center is whether money makes life easier or harder.

The question at the edge is what people are willing to do to have money.

And for, this was a meditation on another question: what does it mean to have enough?

Most of the characters in the book have too much. It causes them guilt. It causes them to do stupid things. It keeps them insulated from the world around them and from themselves.

Money is a tool, but it is also freighted with meaning in our culture. You need money for a place to live, to pay for groceries and electricity, to navigate through life. Some money makes life easier.

And then there’s a point where it doesn’t make life easier. It may make life a little better, of course. I belonged to a fancy gym for a while, and that $200 a month membership bought super nice towels and hot showers and a couple of mini-fridges full of cool washcloths. It didn’t get me a better workout than I could get anywhere else, though, including at home for free. I dropped my fancy gym membership because I stopped working downtown, raising the cost of going to that gym to a 45-minute commute each way. The fancy gym was fun, when I had the money and the opportunity, but a nice walk with a friend in the evening is also fun—and free.

A lot of us want to hear is that it’s better to grow up without immense amounts of money, that we are better off for having to be resourceful and hardworking, and there’s a point that we would not compromise ourselves for a few extra bucks. But are we really sure about that?  

I don’t know.

At the same time as I was finishing up Long Island Compromise, I read an interview in the New York Times with Jonathan Clements (gift link), who had been the personal finance columnist for the Wall Street Journal and who writes the Humble Dollar blog (slogan: “If your children want for nothing, they have too much.”) Clements is a fan of frugality and tells people to plan to live to 90 or beyond. But he has cancer and will probably die within a year, at age 62. But he says he has no regrets. While he lived on much less money than he could have, he is happy with how he lived. He says that money gives you peace of mind when you have enough to cushion unexpected expenses or setbacks.

Do you have enough? What would it take?