In a world tuned to always ask for more, more productivity, more possessions, more progress, the choice to stop, to say “this is enough,” can feel like a betrayal of the social script. But maybe the script is wrong. Sufficiency is often framed as sacrifice, as lack, as the gray austerity that arrives when idealism meets economic reality. That framing misses the point entirely. Practiced deliberately, sufficiency isn’t about having less. It’s about having what’s truly yours, your time, your energy, your clarity, returned to you from systems that would rather keep you running in place.
How is “enough” a luxury? Isn’t luxury, by definition, something that is more than enough, something “that is pleasant to have but is not necessary”? And isn’t “having enough,” in material terms, a necessity?
Our lives are more than material possessions; they also include emotional richness. The former is what we are told to chase; the latter is what makes life feel worthwhile. You can fill a room with new things and still feel hollow. You can walk away from the marketplace and find abundance in forms that can’t be purchased: intimacy, presence, friendship, and creativity. These are surpluses that don’t coercively extract anything from anyone else and don’t depend on planetary exploitation.
Anthropologist David Graeber (2018) once observed that capitalism is very good at producing “bullshit jobs,” roles that don’t need to exist but that keep people too busy or too tired to imagine alternatives. A similar point can be made about consumer products: a growing proportion of what gets made and sold doesn’t meet a real need. It meets an engineered insecurity.
Sufficiency becomes powerful when it is chosen, not imposed. Austerity, after all, is usually something done to people by those who’ll never feel its effects. But sufficiency, properly understood, is something we do for ourselves. It is a volitional boundary that marks the difference between enough and too much. Where that line falls isn’t fixed; it bends with context, culture, and capacity. But knowing the line is there, and being willing to hold it, is an act of refusal. It’s also an act of reclamation. To say “enough” in a culture designed to seduce you into more is to begin the work of liberation.
That liberation is both personal and structural. Consumer culture runs on dependency, and not just the economic kind. When we are conditioned to measure our worth through accumulation, the demand for more becomes an identity, not a preference. The result is a manufactured form of lack, one that feeds the very systems we might otherwise resist. This dynamic isn’t accidental. It’s designed. Many of the platforms and industries that dominate public and private life, from fast fashion to digital media, survive by manufacturing desires they can then sell back to us, piece by piece. As Zuboff notes in her analysis of surveillance capitalism, commodifying attention and behavior isn’t just a byproduct of digital systems; it’s the business model.
Sufficiency is a way to opt out of that game. Not entirely, of course, most of us still live within economies that punish those who reject their terms. But within those limits, there’s room to cultivate a different ethic. This isn’t minimalism as lifestyle branding or aesthetic discipline. It’s not about stark interiors or counting how many shirts you own. It’s about asking a harder question: what supports your dignity, your joy, your capacity to show up for others, and what just distracts you from it?
That kind of clarity doesn’t emerge from a spreadsheet. It requires time, rest, and quiet forms of attention that our dominant systems make artificially scarce. The economist Tim Jackson argues that time affluence, having enough time to care, think, and relate, is as crucial to well-being as income. Yet we’ve structured life in a way that trades time for status, rest for productivity, and care for convenience. In that context, sufficiency isn’t subtraction. It’s the space where neglected forms of wealth begin to reappear.
There’s also something worth revisiting in the idea of asceticism, not as denial, but as spaciousness. In religious or philosophical traditions, ascetic practice wasn’t primarily about punishment or piety. It was about clearing the noise so something deeper could emerge. Simone Weil called this “attention,” not in the shallow sense of focus, but in the spiritual sense of letting the real reveal itself. Thich Nhat Hanh and Plum Village Buddhism call this “mindfulness,” simply being aware of what is happening
You can’t force that kind of perception. You can only make room for it. And making room often means saying no to excess, to distraction, to the relentless churn of fabricated urgency.
When we think about degrowth, we often focus on systems: scaling down industries, rethinking infrastructure, and decommodifying care. These are essential. But there’s a parallel transformation that happens at the level of the self. Sufficiency isn’t only a political principle. It’s a spiritual and psychological orientation toward limits, not as burdens, but as contours. Knowing where enough lives inside you, and honoring it, gives form to your freedom. Without it, freedom collapses into compulsion.
To live with enough is not to settle for less. It’s to refuse to be managed by more. It means opting out of the trap where satisfaction is always just one purchase, one milestone, one upgrade away. It’s a shift from extraction to stewardship, from acquisition to relation. And this isn’t only about things. It’s also about information, identity, and even ambition. The systems that profit from overconsumption also benefit from our confusion, from our attention being too fractured to notice the terms of the deal.
And here’s the surprising part: choosing sufficiency doesn’t lead to lack. It leads to depth. When you stop chasing after what you don’t need, what you already have becomes more visible. And often, that includes things we’ve been told to devalue, rest, slowness, care, and reciprocity. These aren’t leftovers. They’re the foundation of any life worth living. Odell argues that real refusal isn’t about retreating from the world. It’s about finding where your attention wants to go once it’s no longer being hijacked.
Ultimately, sufficiency is not a limit on what you can have. It is a practice of deciding what you don’t need to hold onto anymore. It’s not less than you need. It’s no more than your dignity requires.
Photo credit Justine
 | A guest post by
|
A better formulation than abundance
Lovely articulation.