The “Never Enough” Problem
Or, how our lives are defined by scarcity
👋 Hey there! Welcome to a new edition of The Sunday Wisdom! My name is Abhishek. I read a lot of books, think a lot of things, and this is where I dump my notes and (so called) learnings.
I mostly write to educate my future self, but if you like what you read here, I would say this hobby of mine just became a bit more purposeful. Now… time for the mandatory plug!
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On to this week’s essay! It’s about 1500 words.
Q: How to avoid the feeling of not having enough?
In the classic movie On The Waterfront, Marlon Brando’s Terry Malloy had been an up-and-coming boxer until powerful local mob boss Johnny Friendly persuaded him to throw a fight. After a series of other events, his boxing career is over and his life is going nowhere. There’s a classic scene where he confronts his elder brother for not looking after him.
“You don’t understand! I could’ve had class. I could’ve been a contender. I could have been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am.”
He’s a bum — that’s his reality. But his life is haunted by scarcity. It’s defined by the of things he doesn’t have — class, recognition, identity. It’s a sad realisation.
Today, let’s talk about scarcity. Scarcity rules our lives. The lack of things influences our lives way more than you think.
The goal of this essay is to help you assess your life from the point of view of scarcity — see if it’s really a problem, and if it is, what is a good approach to deal with it.
Tell me if this is what your typical day is. Your first waking thought is, “I didn’t get enough sleep.” The next one is, “I don’t have enough time.”
Before you sit up in bed, even before your feet touch the floor, you’re already inadequate, already behind, already losing, already lacking. Whether true or not, these gnawing thoughts of not enough occur automatically.
By the time you go to bed at night, your mind is racing with a litany of what you didn’t get or didn’t get done, and what you need to do to catch up. Naturally, you go to sleep burdened by those thoughts and wake up to that reverie of lack. And this cycle continues.
You spend most of the hours of your day and most of the days of your life hearing, explaining, complaining, or worrying about what you don’t have enough of. “I don’t have enough money,” “I don’t have enough success,” “I don’t have a big enough home, a good enough spouse, a new enough car.”
Interestingly, this internal condition of scarcity lives at the very heart of your jealousies, your greed, your prejudice, and your frustrations with life.
On top of that, what makes this constant assessing and comparing so self-defeating is that you are either comparing your life, marriage, family to some unattainable media-driven vision of perfection, or you’re holding up your reality against your own fictional account of how great someone else has it.
Even nostalgia is a dangerous form of comparison. “Remember when…? Those were the days…” are signs that you are comparing your present life with a past memory that is so much edited that it never really existed.
But that’s not even the real problem. They real problem is that you’ll never have enough — at least as long as your are hyperaware of what you are lacking. You’ll never have enough, no matter how much you really have, as long as you let your life be governed by scarcity.
You might argue that scarcity identifies your shortcomings, and thus helps you fix them. You might say that this constant comparison with others is what is pushing you to try harder to make more money, get more success, buy bigger houses, cars, boats, etc.
You might say that scarcity creates success.
You aren’t completely wrong. But this success comes at a cost.
Is your success really worth the price you’re paying? Ask yourself some of the following questions.
Is your self-worth closely tied to your achievements? Is the fear of being belittled or ridiculed forcing you to grow? Are you judging yourself and others by a set of narrow standards instead of appreciating (or even acknowledging) the unique gifts you may possess? Are you in constant fear of taking risks or trying new things because you might fail? Are you struggling to be seen and heard? Are you too focussed on fitting in and don’t care if you really belong?
If you haven’t understood it already, these are wrong motivations — the kind you would want to avoid. Let me go ahead and say it: these aren’t just wrong but also stupid motivations to pursue success.
You might be climbing the success ladder on the outside, but the price you are paying for success is also eating you on the inside. This isn’t a smart way to live. You are constantly haunted by scarcity.
Worrying about scarcity is our generation’s version of PTSD. But rather than coming together to heal, we’re angry and scared and at each other’s throats. This creates a vicious cycle. More competition, more distrust, more feelings of not enough leads for more scarcity, and thus the cycle continues.
So, what can you do about it? Well, simply put, if you want to get rid of feelings of being “not enough,” you’ll have to find out what’s “enough” for you first. “Enough,” not “abundance”.
The counterapproach to living in scarcity is not about abundance. This is something most people fail to understand. Having “more than you could ever imagine” has its own sets of problems.
In fact, abundance isn’t very different from scarcity. They are the two sides of the same coin. Both of them must be avoided.
The opposite of “never enough” is “feeling enough.” There are many tenets of feeling enough, but at its very core is vulnerability and worthiness — the courage to face uncertainty, exposure, and emotional risks knowing that you are worthy.
Vulnerability is not a weakness. Vulnerability is about confronting your deepest fears so that you can be honest with yourself and, by extension, others. It’s not knowing victory or defeat. It’s understanding the necessity of both. It’s about engaging and being all in.
Vulnerability requires courage. The uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure you face every day are not optional. Your only choice is to either engage or not engage. Your willingness to own and engage with your vulnerability determines the depth of your courage.
On the flip side, the level to which you protect yourself from being vulnerable is the measure of your fear.
An example of vulnerability is sharing an unpopular opinion, or standing up for yourself, or asking for help, or saying no, or starting your own business, or trying something new — anything that requires great courage.
Worthiness doesn’t have prerequisites. Most of us have a long list of “worthiness qualifiers” in categories of accomplishments (“When I lose this weight”), acquisitions (“When I get a promotion”), and validation (“when s/he asks me out”). But our worthiness, that core belief that we are enough, doesn’t come from chasing “perfection”.
Perfectionism is a never-ending dance. It’s exhausting! You will never be perfect. But it doesn’t mean you aren’t worthy of perfection.
Worthiness comes only when you not only accept but own who you are. Even the messy parts. Especially the messy parts.
Research suggests that those who feel lovable, who love, and who experience belonging simply believe they are worthy of love and belonging — nothing more, nothing less.
They might have real or fake reasons to feel worthy, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is that they do feel worthy.
If you don’t feel worthy today (for whatever ‘rational’ reason), no amount of success, love, money, recognition will ever make you feel so tomorrow.
Worthiness comes from acceptance. It’s a simple (yet not easy) shift in mindset. There are no conditions or prerequisites.
Having said that, it’s harder said than done. We are not only haunted by our own sense of scarcity, but also surrounded by others who are haunted by theirs. This creates a cesspool of an environment of shame, comparison, and disengagement.
Scarcity thrives in our culture because all of us are hyperaware of lack.
This scarcity culture kills our willingness to own our vulnerabilities and our ability to engage with the world from a place of worthiness.
Not only do we feel we are unworthy, we believe others are equally worthless.
If you want to feel enough, you have to fight scarcity head on and overcome the feelings of “never enough” every single day.
The larger culture is always applying an invisible pressure. The default is always a state of scarcity. That is why it’s so hard to break the mould, and try something new. People simply lose their minds and come after you with everything they’ve got — like mad dogs.
There’s an inner critic who constantly puts us down, making us feel we aren’t enough. Then there are external critics, who are so tormented by scarcity that it has made them bitter.
But if you start from a place of vulnerability and worthiness, if you accept who you really are, if you muster the courage to fight for what you believe in, the critic doesn’t count.
It’s the man in the arena, in the words of Theodore Roosevelt, “whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood,” who counts. For even “if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly.”
I urge you to dare greatly.
Timeless Insight
In soccer, it’s common knowledge that the penalty shoots are one third of the time at the middle of the goal, one third of the time at the left, and one third of the time at the right. The goalkeeper has a good chance of catching the ball just by standing in the middle rather than diving in the wrong direction. Yet, they jump!
Why on earth do they do it? Because it looks more impressive (and feels less embarrassing) to dive to the wrong side than to freeze on the spot and watch the ball sail past.
It’s all about appearances. Look active, even if it achieves nothing. Because the optics of doing nothing has consequences.
Even if you value contemplation over action, outright inaction always remains a cardinal sin. You get no honour, no medal, no statue with your name on it if you make exactly the right decision by waiting — for the good of your team, your company, or even humanity.
On the other hand, if you demonstrate decisiveness and quick judgment, and the situation coincidentally improves, it’s quite possible that your boss, or even the president, will shake your hand.
Society at large still prefers rash action to a sensible wait-and-see strategy.
What I’m Reading
One of the biggest issues with mainstream feminist writing has been the way the idea of what constitutes a feminist issue is framed. We rarely talk about basic needs as a feminist issue. Food insecurity and access to quality education, safe neighbourhoods, a living wage, and medical care are all feminist issues. Instead of a framework that focuses on helping women get basic needs met, all too often the focus is not on survival but on increasing privilege. For a movement that is meant to represent all women, it often centres on those who already have most of their needs met.
— Mikki Kendall, Hood Feminism
Tiny Thought
Knowledge is subtractive, not additive. Becoming more knowledgeable is more about knowing what not to do, what does not work, and what to avoid — not the opposite.
Before You Go…
Thanks so much for reading! Send me ideas, questions, jokes. You can write to abhishek@coffeeandjunk.com, reply to this email, or use the comments.
Until next Sunday,
Abhishek 👋
Very useful! Keep up the great writing.
Great article today.