The tragedy of constantly getting more

Your deepest desire, what you were really made for. This life, a team game

I wrote about it before, but I love the story: Joseph Heller was at a Manhattan party thrown by some Wall Street millionaire, with his buddy Kurt Vonnegut, who said:

“You see that fellow over there? He makes more money in one day than you’ve made for all of Catch 22.”

Heller replied, “But he doesn’t have one thing that I have.” So Vonnegut asked, “What?” Heller’s response:

“I know when I have enough.” 

Enoughness

Did you know we Americans have twice as much stuff as we did in 1998, twenty-five years ago? And in 1998, we had twice as much stuff as we did in 1972?¹ It’s true. We have four times as much as we did 50 years ago, when I was born. But after a certain amount, getting more doesn’t really help you get what you really want. It’s like food. You need it. In fact, you need it everyday for the rest of your life. But after you get enough, it’s not going to do you any good. In fact, too much and it might doing yourself harm. The dose is the poison.

Our continual focus on getting and spending more money means we lose time, freedom, and health. Put another way, if our economy doubled in the last 25 years, we could now be working half as much instead of having twice as much. We could have had more hours in our day, more freedom from work, and healthier lifestyles. It was a game of Would You Rather and we chose money. It’s tragic.

In the next 25 years we will be faced with the same decision. Any bets on what we’ll choose now?

The oldest and most grievous misfortune

The great economist John Kenneth Galbraith believed in the 1930s that industrialization had already met all humanity’s needs and in the future, his grandchildren would only work 15 hours a week (mostly to stay engaged with life). He wrote eloquently about the problem of “more is better:”

To furnish a barren room is one thing. To continue to crowd in furniture until the foundation buckles is quite another. To have failed to solve the problem of producing goods would have been to continue man in his oldest and most grievous misfortune. But to fail to see that we have solved it, and to fail to proceed thence to the next tasks, would be fully as tragic.

What Galbraith would think now, with our online shopping, our 2500 square foot homes,² garages, and storage units, and our ubiquitous marketing and advertising?³ We continue to crowd our lives with more things and activities far beyond what anyone could have ever imagined in 1930. And to please who? At the cost of what?

We’ve chosen our individual material wealth at the cost of something much greater. When asked about the future of American culture in 1982, Christopher Reeve feared a world of “rich people with no soul, comfortable, and efficient but with no real life.”

I believe what we truly seek in life is not comfort, but a profound and whole-hearted participation in life. That requires an uncomfortable entanglement with the truth, about yourself and the world. And then after that, opening yourself to love. James Baldwin said:

“Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word ‘love’ here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace - not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.”

The universal quest is to enter the dark cave you fear to enter, face the inner dragon shadow, and retrieve the treasure of wholeness. That’s what Galbraith warned us would be tragic: once we had fulfilled our material needs, we would avoid the cave, we would choose to coast through life in the passenger seat, absent real intentionality or awareness of the growth that awaited us.

Do you see that in our society? In yourself?

H/T Chip Conley

The next tasks

Galbraith’s warning reminds me of the American mystic Thomas Merton:

“Why do we spend our lives striving to be something that we would never want to be, if only we knew what we wanted? Why do we waste our time doing things which, if we only stopped to think about them, are just the opposite of what we were made for?”

So I’ll ask this personally to you: Do you have enough? Do you have more than enough? Is constantly getting more keeping you from what you were really made for?

When I trained to become a Franciscan spiritual director, in our first lesson, Sister Mary Jo asked us to sit in silence for a period of time and contemplate the question:

In Franciscan spirituality, when you find your deepest desire, you find God. You don’t find God in letting go of your desires or sacrificing yourself, but in finding the thing you want most.

If you spent time contemplating “What is your deepest desire?” what would you come up with?

I asked the AI machine Chat GPT that very same question. It replied:

“Our deepest longing is to feel connected, to feel loved, and to be accepted.

We all want to feel like we belong and that we are part of something bigger than ourselves. We want to be accepted for who we are and have our unique gifts and talents appreciated. We want to feel that we are connected to others in meaningful ways, that we are loved, and that we are seen and heard. We strive for a sense of purpose and meaning in our lives, and to know that we matter and make a difference.”

The sum of humanity’s knowledge and experience came down to that. I assume you had a similar answer for yourself.

When The Appreciation Effect recipients talk about what they learned from being appreciated for days and weeks, the most common refrain is that they realized that they were loved, and accepted, as they were, without having to do anything. They realize they accepted for who we are and have their unique gifts and talents appreciated. They get a sense that their lives mean something to those around them. In other words, it’s the experience of enoughness and grace that we can only find in each other. That’s what we’re missing. As my friend Corvas Brinkerhoff told me, “I suspect spirituality is a team game.”

In every religion, Western or Eastern, the goal is moving from “me” to “we.” Spiritual teacher Adyeshanti puts it: “the goal of all spirituality is to awaken from the dream of separation and let go into the reality of unity. Spirituality is letting go of effort, want, and control and seeing what happens. All suffering stems from the belief we are separate.” Individualism, privilege, and status are the very things capitalism promotes. But the spiritual quest is a journey of surrender, dying to yourself and everything you thought you was you, to be reborn to something greater.

If you made a list of everything you own, everything you think of as you, everything that you prefer, that list would be the distance between you and the living truth. —Stephen Levine

For thousands of years we were nourished by being members of a community, gathering around the fire, hearing the stories of the elders, feeling supported during times of loss and grief, offering gratitude, singing together, sharing meals at night and our dreams in the morning. I call these activities “primary satisfactions.” We are hard-wired to want them, but few of us receive them. In their absence we turn to secondary satisfactions: rank, privilege, wealth, status — or, on the shadow side, addictions. The problem with these secondary satisfactions is that we can never get enough of them. We always want more. But once we find our primary satisfactions, we don’t want much else. — Francis Weller

Do you have enough? Is constantly getting more keeping you from your deepest desire? When you find your deepest desire, you find God. The primary satisfaction of belonging: moving from “me” to “we,” as good as a definition of God as I could imagine. Spirituality is a team game.

This life, a team game.

Next Financial Freedom 1 cohort is July-August

FF1 starts July 1 and runs until August 31. Most people on this mailing list have taken it. If you haven’t taken it and want to see how money connects to every other part of your life (and it does), consider it.

I teach other courses too, like the Emotional Consequences of Capitalism. Reach out if you’re interested in any of this.

1. Our economy grows at 3% a year, as per last week’s newsletter, means we double every 25 years.

2. Average house built in 1950 was 950 square feet. Now it’s over 2500 square feet, for fewer people.

3. Almost everyone I know says they are immune to advertising. In the 1970s, people saw about 1000 ads a day. In 2007, it was about 5000 ads and in 2021, estimates are between 6000-10,000 ads per day (source). Companies don’t spend $300 billion on advertising in 2021 if it doesn’t result in people buying the things in advertisements. The average person spends over 8 hours on digital media per day, 2.5 hours of it on social media.