Pattern #50
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Life-Enhancing Enoughness
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Realizing long-term broad benefits involves realizing an abundance of life-serving qualities and conditions in both the present and the future. So counter both unnecessary scarcity and tendencies towards greed, extremism and unconstrained appetite by promoting the ample sufficiency of prudence, simplicity, companionship, health, beauty, gratitude, generosity, equity, spirit and creativity.
Some related patterns: 2 Appreciative Thinking 13 Commons and Commoning 32 Fair Sharing of Costs and Benefits 61 Partnership Culture 72 Regenerativity 84 Tackling Cognitive Limitations 86 Universal Intelligence
- What is enough? (What is too much? What is too little?) What does that mean for how we live our lives and organize our collective lives?
- What things and activities in life deeply satisfy us while costing little or nothing and creating few or no bad effects on the life around us?
- Is there a point where an abundance of stuff gets in the way of feeling an abundance of aliveness? Where is that point for each of us? What can we do about it? How can we support each other in dealing creatively with that odd reality?
- In what areas can our partnership with each other and the life energies around us produce more abundance than our efforts to go it alone or to control everything?
- What needs can we fulfill together by sharing and gifting more? How can we go about doing that?
Going deeper …
This is an edited version of the video on this page.
As part of generating the long-term broad benefits which constitute the essence of public wisdom – the wisdom of a whole society engaged in wise democratic self-governance – we need to think in terms of the seventh generation after us. We have inherited this profound seventh generation consideration from American indigenous cultures. We need to ask: What is the seventh generation after us going to have to work with? What will their culture be like? How is their culture going to look at how to satisfy their own needs? How will they look at how we are going about satisfying ours?
This rapidly moves into questions of sustainability. Within the physical constraints of a limited world, how should we relate to physical resources in order to leave enough for the future? And in the present, how do we create our society, our economies, our politics to have enough for all the people who are here now and for the other life forms we share this planet with?
We need to realize there are constraints to our consumption, obviously, because there are physical limits. However, remarkably, there is also tremendous potential abundance hidden in those constraints. There are many surveys of how happy people are with different levels of wealth and consumption. It turns out, as expected, that people who are seriously deprived – and suffering because of it – are not happy. But it also turns out that people who have lots of things tend to be attached to those things and they are also not happy. People in the middle who have enough to survive and feel more or less comfortable, yet have challenges on the physical level, find happiness in nonphysical, non-consumptive realities. They gain happiness through relationships, through beauty, through their connection to nature, through spirit, and through creativity, both individually and collectively.
These sources of happiness don’t require massive inputs of energy and material, so there’s tremendous room for expansion, for growth. In most societies there are many people who have things that other people don’t have and if you create systems for sharing – a culture of sharing and gifting – suddenly there is an abundance that wasn’t apparent before when everybody was hiding their gifts, protecting their possessions and holding energy away from each other.
The idea of co-creating enough and discovering enough actually can create massive abundance. What life serving qualities do each of us possess individually and together? What life serving qualities could we find in our communities, in our societies and in our economic systems? How do we want to nurture those? What are the conditions now and in the future which will serve this sense of enoughness so that long-term broadly shared benefits are available to everybody?
We don’t want to have unnecessary scarcity. There is some necessary scarcity so we have to manage that in various ways. But we don’t want unnecessary scarcity and suffering to be there. And we don’t want greed and the need to have more and more. And we don’t want extremism that is trying to push one way of looking at things, one way of doing things on everybody else. We don’t even want ourselves to feel that we have to be extreme in some way. That is damaging to our larger shared well-being that we are trying to promote. And of course unconstrained appetites – where we want more more more – that is a version of greed.
This is not just an issue with material things. We can think “I want absolute freedom.” I’m sorry, but absolute freedom doesn’t exist. Freedom exists within certain constraints. If we want to be free to do things, we need to have relationships with the larger world and with each other that are healthy, that enable us to do those things without undue damage. And part of that health is accepting certain constraints. We don’t want to get into extremes, we want to nurture the sense of the middle way, the Buddhist path. And we don’t all need two cars. Three or five families can share a car. We can have good public transportation, nobody has to walk 10 miles to get water. Get rid of the extremes of wealth and poverty.
Research has shown that more equitable distribution of wealth in a society creates much healthier societies overall. So a culture of abundant enoughness nurtures prudence: You want to take care of what we have and take care of the generative capacity of the living systems we live in, the social and natural systems. We want them to be able to support us and our grandchildren. So we take care of them and don’t overdo.
And we thrive on simplicity: we don’t need a lot. We can live into having enough and feeling good about that.
And we focus a lot on health, for enoughness serves health. Taking too much food, doing too much exercise, consuming too much enjoyable entertainment or drugs or whatever – these things are unhealthy. So we focus on what’s healthy, what’s wholesome.
And we’re being grateful for that. Much of quality of life is simply being grateful. And sharing that gratitude with other people, and sharing that gratitude in a meditative sense with the larger universe: “Thank you for giving me what I have, for giving us what we have.” And because we have enough, we feel we want to give to others. The more we give to others, the more they want to give to us. In the spirit of generosity, we create a gifting economy, we are happy to give to each other and get that sweet status. Oddly enough we get status by giving to each other.
And equity, we want to see more balance. We don’t want to have privileges that other people don’t have that ruin their lives. Equity is part and parcel of life-enhancing enoughness, I have enough advantages in my life, I don’t need more and more and more. I want to use what advantages I have to help other people who have less advantages to gain more.
The fact that we can and are all co-creating this is such a blessing, such a blessing to do it together. So that’s part of the energy, the abundance of enoughness that comes from our pride that we are creating a lot, we are creating our lives, we are sharing, we are creating this rich enoughness. And that co-creation itself is very life serving.
Video Introduction (10 min)
Examples
- Quality of life indicators Link
- The Simple Living movement Link-Wikipedia
- Gift Economy Link-Wikipedia
- Stretch: Unlock the Power of Less – and achieve more than you ever imagined
Link-Book
Link-Article - The New Materialism Link
- The Story of Stuff Link
- Permaculture Pattern Language (book) pp. 15-26, 98-100
- Easterlin Paradox Link-Wikipedia
- Paradox of Affluence Link
- Radical Gratitude Link
- Catalytic Thinking Practices Link
- Decluttering Link
There are a bunch of alternative indicators to Gross Domestic Product. GDP is basically how much money is spent in the economy. And it has a lot to do with consumption. So we want to move away from that into what really makes life worth living. Let’s measure that and keep that improving. And that will naturally gravitate towards an abundance of life-enhancing enoughness. Among the approaches to quality of life indicators are The Genuine Progress Indicator and Gross National Happiness.
The Simple Living movement and the gift economy involve an attitude of let us share more, let us give each other more, let us find our life value and our life meaning in supporting rich relationships with a sense of all of us being in this together – and it ends up being very potent.
Enoughness; what a great work and concept. Like the joy that leaving behind the striving for perfection can bring when one embraces “good enough for now”, it is fun to contemplate the massive release of energy and resources possible in a switch to “life enhancing enoughness”!
Your “massive release of energy and resources” comment actually articulates the living link between enoughness and abundance really well, Kathy!!
As I read this card and the comments to it, I wonder, “Can a society embrace or manifest “enoughness,” if the individuals in that society do not do it on an individual level? Would societal “enoughness” be the composite result of all or most individual “enoughness?” As I write that question, it occurs to me that no, we could all have individual “enoughness,” but for this to be a characteristic of the society or group we belong to, it would have to be intentionally incorporated into the societal structures, goals, etc., as Tom explains above. What a complicated concept! As mentioned previously, each individual has their own concept or definition of “enoughness,” which might make consensus about societal “enoughness” more challenging to achieve. Who decides how much is enough? How is the decision made? I know that I struggle with “enoughness” in my personal life as I have a distorted perception of it based in childhood experience. It is a life-long battle grounded in fear of scarcity.
The Worldwatch Institute’s Alan Durning wrote a book entitled How Much is Enough? It doesn’t answer the question (as you note, Laurie, answers tend to be relative to this or that context or consideration) but it does model the kind of inquiry the question challenges us to do for ourselves, our communities, our contexts. And I think there’s a big feedback loop between individuals and groups and societies (and their cultures and systems). The “enoughness” dynamics and narratives in any of them can influence the “enoughness” dynamics in the others, for better or worse.
Luckily, all this doesn’t have to be a battle. There is a LOT of evidence that “too much” (of so many things) actually makes most of us unhappy while “too little” does the same. The trick is to focus on quality of life – the “life-enhancing” part – and to seriously sense into what REALLY makes us happy, while remaining mindful of the impacts of our consumerist choices on other people, life forms, systems, etc. It is actually pretty amazing how happy one can be with very little in the way of money and stuff, especially in the context of a community that seeks to support exactly that kind of happiness in, with, and for each other.
It strikes me that ‘life enhancing enough-ness’ is a much harder quality to manifest collectively (in a group) than individually. We each have our internal or private economies operating, and may consider from time to time how scarcity and abundance balance each other. ‘I was so fortunate yesterday, so I can accept with grace the tough time I’m having today’. How can we foster this important quality in our group life? Perhaps by consciously/actively affirming this as an element in our group culture. Or – in a practical sense – by weaving into the group agenda regular discussions that are abundance-focused.
I suspect that your reflection is very valid, James, especially in our consumerist culture which pulls us in exactly the opposite direction. In that context, we appropriately see our group life as a source of potential support in resisting the Siren call of consumerism. But keep in mind that not all cultures have been or are consumerist – the Amish and many traditional indigenous cultures being notable examples. And the word “collective” applies to communities, societies, cultures and civilizations as well as to groups (and networks and organizations, etc.). So, while much in this pattern language can be applied to individual and group life, its primary application – as suggested by its “wise democracy” framing – is to the design of communities, societies, cultures and civilizations. And a civilization that aspired to embody collective wisdom and to practice generating it would need to find ways to DESIGN this pattern into its narratives, processes, structures, etc., with validations, supports, measurements, norms, rituals, etc., that made “life-enhancing enoughness” the expected texture of life rather than a struggling exception to the dominant waste and unhappiness. Check out the Manfred Max-Neef links in the Examples and Resources section of the Grounding in Fundamental Needs pattern.
This pattern draws me today, as I particularly reflect on the need for rest cycles in context for regenerativity, it is also important in contradicting white supremacy culture across multiple dimensions. I particularly appreciate the intent of “life-enhancing” as an important attribute to notice about processes and people. Great shared language and understanding to cultivate for embodied living systems.