The following is an article I recently wrote for More.com. It’s about our insatiable desire beyond stability for “things”—and how this can stifle our quest to reinvent ourselves.

“There are two kinds of hunger—the hunger for food and the hunger for more. I’ve been taught to look past what I have to what I don’t have. I have a car, but I’m always noticing the car I’d rather have. I have 12 shirts, but I’m always noticing the 13th shirt that I want to buy. We’re suffering from a profound lack of relationship with enough—we are about what we don’t have.”
—Dan Karslake, Documentary filmmaker of Every Three Seconds, an upcoming film about ending world hunger

No doubt about it, there’s great beauty in having enough. It gives us the freedom to reinvent ourselves. If we’re living at a survival level and spending most of our time worrying about paying our bills and meeting basic needs, it’s quite hard to focus on finding our purpose and pursuing our life’s work. As Abraham Maslow pointed out in his famous Hierarchy of Needs pyramid, we must first satisfy our needs for survival and safety before we can address the higher level of self actualization. 

Yet how many of us actually know what “enough” is? If there were mile posts on our journey, that marked “survival,” “basic comfort” and “excess,” would we even know when we past each point? Probably not. As this excerpt from my book, Professional Destiny, discusses the cost of “more” can be quite high.

“A trap that we are all susceptible to, especially in the Western world, is that we overlook the concept of having enough. We come to never fully enjoy what we have because we are always thinking about what we don’t yet have (a nicer home or car, more possessions, a bigger company, more money, finer art). This sense of wanting more is an insatiable hunger. It is poison to our soul and kills new, creative possibilities because it locks us into a pattern. It might make our life more comfortable but it doesn’t bring us true fulfillment, which only comes when we feel like we are making a difference in a genuine, meaningful way.