Then, in 1765, to help him fund his daughter’s dowry, Catherine the Great bought his library for £1,000 and agreed to pay him a stipend for being her private librarian. With his newfound wealth, Diderot bought himself a beautiful scarlet dressing gown to replace his old robe, a simple garment he had been the absolute master of.

His Paris study—once home to a straw chair, a wooden table, a simple rug, a wood plank holding a few books, and a couple of unframed smoky prints—suddenly seemed vulgar next to his exquisite new robe. Trying to solve this aesthetic discord, Diderot replaced everything with matching luxuries. Not long after, financial distress followed.

A multitude of consequential purchases, following the purchase of a single always-wanted item, is known as the Diderot Effect. We all are susceptible to it. Clothes, tech toys, and kitchen gadgets have been where I have fallen for this trap, by saying yes to the scarlet robe instead of saying, “No, thanks.”

As if the Diderot Effect wasn’t risky enough, a consumeristic society benefits from you falling into this trap and will attack your “enough” from all possible angles.

“No, thanks” as a shield against overconsumption

Back in early 2015, after years of watching what I ate and consistently hitting the gym to achieve what I would later consider my best shape ever, my weight started to move in sync with the ASX 200 and eventually peaked, ten years later, at an impressive 30-kilogram increase. My secret: never saying no to deliciously engineered edible mixtures of refined carbohydrates and solidified fats.

I once met someone who called herself a citizen of the world and was the proud owner of a tri-folded A1 world map with circles drawn all over it. She had stories for days, photos taken in some of the most unique spots around the world, and thousands of US dollars in debt, including some from loan sharks who, she said, were impatiently waiting for her return home.

Spending money on experiences is certainly better than buying pizzas and ice cream—I do speak from experience. But given how in-vogue experiences are often expensive, overconsumption of them is likely to lead to crippling debt, which in turn will provide some of the most impactful negative experiences.

Whether it is things or experiences, the pattern is the same: saying yes without considering your enough slowly erodes it.

“No, thanks” as a shield against overcommitment

Saying yes to everything that seems like an opportunity to win is the curse of the Type A modern person. Saying yes to everything that seems like an opportunity to help is the curse of the people pleaser. Saying yes to anything without considering everything else you have already said yes to is a sure way to end up overcommitted and resentful.

The factory worker who takes on extra shifts each weekend so that he can afford the private school tuition of his adolescent twin boys has no time to check how they are doing at school. Always tired and stressed, he feels trapped. The company pays him just enough that working weekends feels financially mandatory—while destroying any chance of finding something better.

He is not greedy. He is simply surrounded by expectations, all of which sound reasonable in isolation. Without a clear sense of what enough looks like for his work and family life, every request feels like something he cannot refuse.

“No, thanks” as a shield against overstimulation

In the late 90’s, during the Mediterranean summer holidays, I used to get extremely bored from the time I devoured whatever nonna had cooked for lunch until the time when the adults in the neighbourhood considered the sun safe enough for my friends and me to go and restart the play that had been cut short a few hours before. I miss getting bored like that.

A few years later, a new type of deeper-than-wider glowing screen, cabled to a plastic suitcase-like noisy machine, which was itself cabled to the telephone socket, presented a better attention-grabbing alternative than the good old TV and quite often a better alternative than spending time with now-teenage friends and foes.

Only recently has YouTube started to give me the same unsettling feeling that cigarettes gave me fifteen years ago, after smoking them for six years before deciding that I was done with that vice.

Saying “No, thanks” to YouTube, leaning into boredom, and starting to chip away at this meaningful hobby of writing feels like a win in practicing my version of enough.

Protecting enough

Rather than a number you reach one day, “enough” is the point at which saying “No, thanks” feels less like deprivation and more like protection.

Each time you reject a purchase, an invitation, or another glowing screen, you are not rejecting life, but affirming which parts of life you want to live more fully.

The world will keep handing new scarlet robes. Our job is to remember that we do not have to accept them, especially when what we already have is quietly, stubbornly, enough.

The story above is what Jack Bogle, the founder of Vanguard and the pioneer of low-cost index investing, opened his 2008 book “Enough: True Measures of Money, Business, and Life”. Bogle passed away in 2019, at the age of 89, with an estimated net worth of $US80 million. At that time, Vanguard had over $US5 trillion under management.

By all accounts, Joseph and Jack practiced what they preached, and they lived a very fulfilling life. Unfortunately, many of us have a lot to do when it comes to choosing enough over more.

The Trap

Consciously and subconsciously we’re told that satisfaction comes from having and achieving more. The more, the better.

To pause and introspect what enough might look like, let alone recognising when we have achieved it, would be modern blasphemy.

Newer, bigger, better are all aimed at eliminating good enough as a viable option. After all, good enough stops the consumer from parting with their after-tax dollars which most of us obtain in exchange for time, attention and overall life energy.

Were we to claim that our home is big enough, our car is good enough; heck, our life is good enough, we would be judged as being uninspired or downright lazy, even from those we value and aim to please.

FOMO is the marketers’ dream tool. It gets us running towards more but, almost always, we are left empty rather than happy.

The first sip from a fancy glass filled with expensive fermented grape juice tastes heavenly; the twentieth is a way to fill silence in a conversation that’s going nowhere.

The initial experience of driving that new car has you smiling as you are reminded how much you deserved the upgrade; until the monthly loan repayment reduces your bank balance by an uncomfortable amount, and you realise that you have 59 more of those.

The bigger home you built, two years after selling the old one which was almost paid for, is your latest prideful achievement; until it becomes the place where you live and return to, after a very long day from a job that you have started to hate since the middle of last year.

The Escape

Maybe a bottle of wine every Friday night, enjoyed with your significant other over dinner, 15 minutes after you drive that shiny new car inside the triple garage of that dream home you finally built just like you always wanted it, is your enough. Or maybe it isn’t—that’s for you to find out.

Recognising when you have enough, spares you the futility of chasing after things you don’t even want, gives you the time to focus on what really matters, and deepens satisfaction while you do all that.

Just as enough is different for each of us, the way we get to it can be just as unique. Some need to lose it all before they recognise that their attachment to those possessions was what kept them from reaching enough. Others need to gain it all, to be convinced how little most of it matters.

However we arrive at this realisation—through lived experiences, thoughtful introspection, or some combination of both—the insight is the same: closing the gap between what you have and what you want is the solution, and the easiest way to close it isn’t to get more, but to recognise you already have enough.

Joseph Heller knew it at that Shelter Island party. Jack Bogle built a trillion-dollar company on it. And somewhere, quietly, without announcing it to anyone, you can know it too: you already have enough.