Enoughness: Can we have our cake and not eat it too ?
In June, we had a neighbors potluck. I was seated next to two young medical interns. One woman said to the other: “Today I had a guy come in, a nurse, saying he wanted a prescription for Ozempic. He’s thin as a rail. He told me he started taking it to ‘understand what his patients were experiencing’ and that it makes him feel so great now he wants to take it full time. I told him: no way, you do not need this drug!”
***
A growing number of my American friends and acquaintances take Ozempic or an equivalent and the word that everyone uses when I ask them about their experience is “miracle.” Sometime last spring, I got curious and started delving into the literature.
There are lots of reports of the weight loss “miracle,” but what intrigued me most was the asterisk: people feeling so good that they wanted to continue treatment, even in the absence of a weight loss benefit.
It is surprising enough that in addition to inducing the body to slim down, the drug appears to eradicate food noise – the omnipresent thoughts of food that plague many people, overweight and not – it seems to suppress other kinds of noise as well.
I have come to the conclusion that maybe, at a very deep level, these drugs are stimulating enoughness.
***
Yep, you caught me, enoughness is not a word. My spellcheck is freaking out. Lots of wavy red lines.
Nonetheless, it is the not-word that seems best describe this GLP-1 induced experience, and since it came to me, I’ve been noticing other people using it too.
Buddhist teacher Spencer Sherman teaches an Enoughness meditation.
Richard Rohr, the Franciscan Monk whose books make the mystical Christian experience accessible to lay people, uses it. In quotations of course. Because, again, it’s not a word.
Not a word, but certainly a state that we recognize. A state of physical, emotional and spiritual fullness.
***
I was a fat child. If at 8 or 10 or 12 I could have gotten my hands on some Ozempic it would have indeed felt like a miracle. There is no part of me that feels in retrospect that it was some sort of learning opportunity to be fat and cellulite ridden in California in the 1980s and 90s. It did not make me a deeper person to feel so ashamed in my own body. It made me a scared and withdrawn person. Not on the outside where I put on a very good show, but on the inside where I lived with a constant discomfort pushing up against every inch of dimpled skin. I learned to suck my stomach in, and with the stomach came my diaphragm, along for the ride. I stopped breathing. I stopped being able to feel my body at all.
***
When I began writing this article in July, I thought I knew where I was going with it.
I thought I was going to write about how surprised people are on GLP-1 treatment to suddenly experience the feeling of enoughness, and how amazing it is that they do.
How that surprise lets us know the extent to which the feeling of enoughness isn’t present in our society.
And about how great the world would be if we were all cured of our pervasive feelings of not-enoughness.
I was going to wonder aloud if maybe, as a society, we could find some other way to get there than jabbing ourselves in the thigh with an expensive drug that essentially works by making our body think it has digested poison.
But in the end, I’m not sure there is a cure for not-enoughness. And I’m not sure there is meant to be.
***
The not-enoughs of 50 years of life could fill this page (at least), from the very earliest childhood “not thin enough” through the teen-age “not cool enough,” to the ever-present “not smart enough,” “not funny enough,” and increasingly “not young enough.”
I don’t earn “enough,” am not productive “enough,” am not followed “enough” on social media.
I am not a good “enough” friend – I forget birthdays – and I live in fear of waking up some day to find that I am that Winnicott anomaly: the not good “enough” mother.
This is hell, someone please jab me with a needle pen.
***
In August, as I was trying to figure out what exactly I wanted to say here, my friend Schuyler Brown an article of her own in which she relates a middle-of-the-night conversation with demons who are keeping her awake.
There was a lot of parallels: from her own list of “not-enoughs” to her description of a pot-bellied demon who finally caves under Schuyler’s interrogation and plaintively admits that he just wants some time and space to digest.
When I called her to chat, we wondered together about the ramifications of the GLP-1 moment, the dangers of anomie versus the benefit of tasting the freedom of “enoughness.”
She told me about an image that had come to her of her demons being interviewed on an 80s talk show like Geraldo or Jerry Springer and we had a really good laugh at that.
She told me about Trungpa Rimpoche’s drawing of a hungry ghost: creatures with giant stomachs but long thin necks and tiny little lips.
They can never fill their belly. They can never get enough.
***
The quest for un-limitedness is at the heart of our current moment. Unlimited knowledge, youth, lifespan, money…
The fundamental promise being sold by these technological inventions is, in each case, to sweep away something that has historically defined our humanity: our own finiteness and the finite resources of our planet.
It is a great paradox that in a society over-flowing with stuff, we have this pervasive sensation of not-enough-ness. But like all good paradoxes, there it is staring us in the face: The more there is to have, the more we feel lacking if we don’t have more of it.
Not-enoughness breeds in that lack, in the delta between life as it is and life as it could be, between we as we are and we as someone else is. Someone on Instagram.
Not-enoughness makes us anxious and ashamed. And when we are in that state, we’ll eat up anything to get those feelings to go away: ice-cream, a video game, the promise of finally feeling “enough” if I buy a new pair of shoes or a new color of nailpolish.
Not-enoughness is arguably the number one driver of our GDP.
***
The scientists and businessmen who are pumping out our AI future have been crystal clear. While their inventions are poised to provide increasing un-limitedness by creating cures for illness and an automated and ever-productive machine workforce, they are just as poised to create a scenario of increasing not-enoughness: not enough jobs at not high enough salaries, not enough energy to feed the machines.
And this is the crux of it, isn’t it. Because while sometimes “enough” means not too much, other times “enough” means not too little.
***
I have seen in a thousand and one ways how dangerous a pervasive feeling of not-enoughness can be. It makes us stingy. It makes us tight. When we convince ourselves that we don’t have enough, are not enough, we pull in. We hoard. We can’t spare the time, the money, or the attention to care for other people in our life or in our community.
We don’t invite friends to share our table.
Everything becomes a cost/benefit analysis, and the cost is always too high.
There are people who very literally do not have enough — not enough food, not enough work, not enough medical care, not enough room in their home, not enough home at all — where does our stinginess leave them?
In this chaotic time, with the AI revolution well underway, we’ve heard a lot of handwringing from the billionaires in charge of our future. They are very clear about the trajectory here, the loss of jobs, of livelihoods, as their inventions simultaneously ramp up to give us more than we ever could have dreamed.
But in all the (copious) blah blah, I have yet to hear a single concrete proposal that lays out steps to ensure that when we come out the other side, everyone will have enough to live in dignity. A proposal to share the enoughness around.
They promise more of everything. But not for everyone.
Yesterday I read about an idea floated not by one of the oh-so-apologetic billionaires but by Senator Bernie Sanders. He proposes writing every US citizen a $1,000 cheque to compensate them for the upheaval.
Adorable.
Seriously, is not-enoughness the global pandemic du jour?
I am apparently not alone in wondering if we should put the billionaires on Ozempic. (link to Bruni & Bret Stephens article)
***
A few years ago, something really blew my mind. I was reading contemporary theologian Meggan Waterson when something suddenly shifted in my understanding. I had always understood the Christian idea of sin as basically: really bad stuff we do that we should try to eradicate. But reading Waterson, sin appeared to me as something intrinsic to our humanity: behaviors and states of mind that get in our way, that trip us up and cause us trouble, that waste our energy and our precious time on earth. But that are an inseparable part of us, woven in tight, and better understood as such. Like exasperating roommates that leave dirty dishes in the sink, our sins live here too.
My attraction toward Buddhist philosophy and the existential therapy I practice as a therapist stems from this same understanding: Buddhists are categorical that suffering is a fundamental part of the human experience and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, founding father of existential therapy, describes a Tragic Triad, three inescapable predicaments of human life: suffering, guilt, and death.
For Frankl, “guilt” in this sense is not what we usually mean by it — blaming yourself for something you’ve done — rather, it is the feeling of not measuring up to your own expectations of yourself. Something closer to the feeling of “not-enoughness.”
As Frankl’s choice of the word predicament suggests, the question for these spiritual and psychological traditions is not how to eradicate these states, but how to live with them, how to negotiate them, indeed, for Frankl, how to make meaning from them and allow them to deepen our human experience. As he puts it:
“Everything can be taken from a person but one thing, the last of the human freedoms: to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.”
From his perspective, the friction of adversity is what shapes our attitude to life, and therapy is akin to tai-chi, basketball or playing the violin: a practice, not a cure.
***
Sometimes friends and family are scandalized when I say stuff like this because they interpret it as legitimizing suffering. They feel that there shouldn’t be suffering at all. I wish that could be true, but it doesn’t really correspond to my experience of life.
The limitless, frictionless, technological utopia we’re being promised seems to have roots in this same fantasy. The belief in infinite “Abundance” turns not-enoughness into a moral issue, in line with a longstanding American tradition:
You don’t have enough? That’s your fault, lazy bum.
You don’t feel enough? You shouldn’t have crapped out on the exercises in that manifesting book you bought last year.
It’s the same logic that’s popping up around healthcare and longevity: cancer — your fault, you should never have drunk that glass of wine — aging — you should never have gone outside without sunscreen — and, of course, dying — you definitely should never have been born.
And it’s the same logic we applied to food before the arrival of Ozempic helped shine light on the mechanisms of hunger: you’d be thin if only you had more willpower.
***
Which brings us back to Ozempic.
In a conversation with Julia Belluz about the GLP-1 revolution, Ezra Klein shares the story of his sweet-tooth aunt who orders dessert after every meal but often leaves half her cake untouched because she is no longer hungry.
Klein laments: how is it that she can do that, but I can’t?
Oh, that little story brought tears in my eyes. The shame of never having “enough” will-power. The years and years of eating dessert but feeling too guilty to enjoy it.
When I was a kid, I would have given anything to be able to have my cake and not eat it too.
***
As GLP-1 research continues to elucidate this wider state of enoughness, and develop new treatments for conditions such as addiction and depression, I hope that as a society we respond by examining how we consider friction and messiness.
This medication, and others to come, will alleviate a lot of suffering for a lot of people. And that will be a miracle.
But friction will inevitably remain embedded in our human lives.
I am convinced, because I’ve witnessed it, that fostering a greater feeling of personal enoughness has a beneficial effect both on the individual, and on the successive rings of community that surround them. But, like vitamins, I wonder how effective it is in pill form.
Maybe enoughness is not meant to be attained in that way.
Maybe its elusiveness is the point, offering us the occasional taste of a perfect and sublime fullness, before eclipsing away again, coming and going like a hummingbird as we cycle through our daily tasks, paying taxes and hanging the laundry.
Maybe the point is to learn to befriend that bird, so it stays a little longer each time.
Maybe enoughness is meant to be a practice, not a cure.
Comments