Mihata Jōryū
Peeking Boy
(1830s)

"Those who more than occasionally experience Enough have already won whatever race they once ran."

Contrary to the popular idiom, Enough is not always Enough, not for everyone. For some, Enough never was nor ever will be Enough, as I detailed in my NextWorld Story, Enough, from February 2025, which described the world emerging after we foolishly elected our current incumbent, a series that has proven to have been remarkably prescient. Prosperity seems to accompany that pleasing sense of enoughness. Whether that sense predates Prosperity or results from achieving it, I lack adequate data to say. I do sense, though, that the Prosperous well understand the theory as well as the practice of Enough to the point of exemplifying this odd little identity function. For them. Enough fully qualifies as Enough, always. The prosperous know satiation, and so actively seek to avoid it. The merely rich or simply wealthy seem to lose accessibility to their off switch. Like sharks, they live unloved, unsatisfiable and unrequited. To not know Enough means you can never stop swimming.

The Prosperous therefore experience love as well as attraction, though not usually to the point of obsession. Prosperity curiously induces a deep sense of moderation. If the dog-eat-dog nature of the world resolves into a conviction that there’s plenty and enough, furious motivation becomes utterly unnecessary. I’m not suggesting that Prosperity necessarily breeds complacency, but it sure seems to breed an abiding sense of at least adequacy. What might have seemed an urgent emergency when Enough seemed insufficient becomes something utterly different under the insidious influence of any abiding sense of Enoughness. It’s interesting how the current administration has found it necessary to declare virtually everything an emergency in order to justify inflicting its policies on our once Prosperous society, and how those policies (tariffs, illegal wars, brutal kidnappings) have reliably rendered us much less Prosperous. These urgencies all seem absolutely phony, but only because we don’t share the administration’s suffocating sense of Enough never seeming to be Enough. For them, the emergency seems as real as it is unresolvable. They might suffer from The Billionaire’s Curse.

It probably doesn’t matter what anyone does in response to their sense that Enough Isn’t Enough. If it isn’t, then every alternative must prove at least equally insufficient or worse. Another game without end ensues where it doesn’t matter whether anyone wins or loses, or even who insists that they won. One effective way to succeed when engaging in games without end involves refusing to play. But refusing to play describes only one successful strategy. One might choose to play with the game instead of simply playing it, to fiddle with the rules, especially the tacit ones: to deliberately try to lose, for instance, and thereby steal the success that might otherwise be associated with winning. One might also insist upon strict adherence to the rules as a means for undermining play, for no game can long survive any strict enforcement of its rules. Whether taken seriously or not, either way, insufficiency games ultimately collapse under the weight of their own initiating insistence. When Enough Isn’t Enough, futility inevitably follows.

The Prosperous seem to understand this, too, that the vehemence others exhibit when attempting to compensate for their innate sense that Enough isn’t Enough ultimately must prove to be self-defeating. The self-sabotage our present incumbent has grown infamous for exhibiting might merely be the natural accompaniment to his deep sense of never-enoughness. The result seems to effectively double-bind those struggling in its clutches. I know of no effective treatment for such an abiding sense of insufficiency. Every imagined satisfaction eventually must get racked up as another failed attempt: Just Can’t Get No Satisfaction. It’s little wonder that such apparently high standards inevitably bring down those infected with this disease. The sole effective treatment seems to be the rough equivalent of disbarment. Those for whom Enough never proves sufficient lose their franchise. They prove insufficient to the normal challenges of living and suffocate themselves Midas-like, on ultimately dissatisfying and unnourishing crosses of silver and gold.

Prosperity seems to be a form of modesty first. It represents quenched thirst rather than frantic search. It seems to understand that most everything might be reasonably classified as nothing more than nice to have rather than essential. The Prosperous can revel even in their insufficiencies, acknowledging just how fortunate they seem when some space remains unfilled in their larder. They sense that the frantic search for anything, let alone sufficiency, must ultimately spoil the searching experience as well as the searcher. If frantic searches aren’t rare as hen’s teeth, they seem excessive, and Prosperity avoids excess like the plague it is. Those for whom enough is withheld inhabit a regrettable corner of Hell. Those who more than occasionally experience Enough have already won whatever race they once ran.

©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Prosperity, #PureSchmaltz