By Dr. Leahcim Semaj
Psychologist | Author | Social Philosopher
The Semaj MindSpa — Where Mind, Spirit, and Science Meet
How much is enough? And when do we finally know that we have enough?
I turned 75 a few days ago. And I have noticed something. Seventy-five does something to the questions you ask yourself. I don’t know whether it happens suddenly or whether it has been creeping up on me for the past few years. But I find myself less interested in How much can I get? and increasingly interested in a much simpler question: How much is enough?
Maybe that is one of the privileges of getting older. You have enough road behind you to recognize some of the foolishness. Including your own. I understand ambition at 25. At that age you are trying to establish yourself. At 35, there may be a family, children, school fees, rent or mortgage, a career to build. By 45 and 55 you may be trying to secure your financial future while still carrying responsibilities for children and, increasingly, ageing parents.
Even at 65 there may be unfinished business. But 75? That makes me curious. I look around and see people who, by any reasonable calculation, already have enough money to live comfortably for the rest of their lives. Some have enough for their children to live comfortably. A few probably have enough for grandchildren who haven’t even been born yet. And still they want more.
Another property. Another investment. Another business. Another board appointment. Another title. More influence. More visibility. More control. I sometimes find myself wanting to ask: More for what?
Nobody Teaches Us “Enough”
Part of the problem may be that our society is very good at teaching us more, but not particularly good at teaching us enough. From childhood we are encouraged to move up. Get better grades. Get a better job. Earn more money. Buy the bigger house. Upgrade the car. Expand the business. Get promoted. Become Chairman. Become President.
Then what? There is always another level. And somewhere along the way we may unconsciously begin using accumulation as a scoreboard for life. If I have more, I must be doing better. If I am doing better, I must be more successful. And if I am more successful, presumably I am more valuable. That last part interests me as a psychologist. Because perhaps what some people are accumulating isn’t really money or property at all. Maybe they are accumulating evidence that they still matter.
What Happens When Achievement Becomes Identity?
Suppose most of your adult life has been built around achievement. You were the one people called. You made the decisions. You had the office. People waited outside your door. Your phone rang constantly. People wanted your opinion, your approval, your signature. Then you get older. The calls become fewer. A younger person now occupies the office. Someone else is Chairman. Someone else gets introduced as CEO. And suddenly there is a question that money cannot easily answer:
Who am I when nobody needs my title anymore?
I suspect that can be frightening. So another million helps. Another appointment helps. Another election helps. Another public appearance helps. Not necessarily because the person is greedy. That explanation is too easy. Sometimes the pursuit of more may be a defence against becoming invisible. The person who spent 40 years being important may not know how to become simply himself. And importance can be addictive.
More Things. Less Time.
There is another little absurdity that becomes difficult to ignore as we get older. Just when we finally have enough money to buy almost anything we want, we may discover that we don’t actually need very much. At 30, you need things. Furniture. Appliances. A car. A house. Clothes for work. Things for the children. By 75, many of us are looking around wondering:
What am I going to do with all this stuff?
The cupboards are full. The closets are full. There are boxes that haven’t been opened in years. You may even have a room containing things you haven’t used since 2018, but somehow you are still reluctant to throw them away. And eventually somebody else will have to deal with all of it. Your children will stand in the house deciding what to keep, what to give away, what to sell and what goes into a garbage bag. There is something almost comical about it. We can spend the first half of life acquiring things and part of the second half trying to get rid of them. So I find myself asking a different question these days.
Not What else can I acquire? But: What can I enjoy while I am here?
And perhaps even more importantly: What can I give away while I am still here to see somebody enjoy it?
Power May Be Harder to Give Up Than Money
Possessions are one thing. Power is another matter entirely. We have all seen people in their seventies and eighties fighting desperately to remain in charge. Politics, business, churches, community organisations, family businesses. Even families themselves. They cannot imagine the organisation functioning without them. Sometimes they say, “Nobody is ready.” And occasionally they may be right. But there is another possibility worth considering. Maybe nobody is ready because you never allowed anybody to get ready.
If you are still making every important decision at 78, what exactly was your succession plan? Leadership, like most things in life, probably has seasons. There is a time to build. A time to lead. A time to fight. A time to make the difficult decisions. Then there should come a time to teach, to mentor and eventually to transfer. That doesn’t mean disappearing. It means changing your role.
One of the marks of successful leadership, I would think, is that what you built can continue when you are no longer standing in the middle of it. If everything falls apart when you leave, perhaps what you created was not leadership. Perhaps it was dependency.
Did We Misunderstand the Assignment?
This brings me to the question I keep returning to. What exactly was the assignment called life? Maybe some of us misunderstood it. Suppose the assignment was never to see who could accumulate the most before dying. That would be a rather strange competition when you think about it. Suppose instead the assignment was to become as fully human as we could, develop whatever gifts we were given, experience life, love some people, learn some things and leave something useful behind.
That changes how you look at success. Money becomes a tool, not a scoreboard. Power becomes something you borrow for a period rather than something you own. Knowledge becomes something to pass on. Experience becomes something younger people shouldn’t have to pay full price to acquire because you can help them avoid a few of the potholes. Maybe that is one of the assignments of the Anchor Leg of Life.
Conversion. Not simply accumulation.
Convert some of the money into experiences.
Convert experience into wisdom.
Convert contacts into opportunities for somebody younger.
Convert knowledge into mentorship.
Convert property into security for the family.
Convert your remaining time into something useful.
And perhaps convert some of your success into generosity.
That seems to make more sense to me now.
Still, You Can’t Take It With You
Everybody knows this. We have known it forever. And yet we sometimes behave as though there is a special arrangement available for successful people. There isn’t. I have never seen a hearse pulling a trailer or followed by a moving van. At some point the house gets another owner. So does the land. Somebody else drives the car. The money moves to another account. The artwork goes somewhere. The clothes get distributed. And the titles disappear remarkably quickly.
Former CEO.
Former Minister.
Former Chairman.
Former President.
Former Professor.
Eventually even “former” doesn’t matter very much. What may remain is the effect you had on people. Who is stronger because you were here? Who got an opportunity because you opened a door? Who learned something from you? Who remembers that you treated them with dignity when you had the power not to? Who felt loved? What did your children learn from you besides how to inherit what you owned? What idea did you put into the world? What institution is better because you passed through it? Those questions interest me much more at 75.
Enough Is Probably Not a Number
I don’t think “enough” can be found on a bank statement. Two people can have exactly the same amount of money and one feels secure while the other is terrified of running out. One person owns three houses and is preoccupied with buying the fourth. Another is sitting in his backyard on a Sunday afternoon, listening to some good music, eating food he enjoys, talking with somebody he loves and thinking:
Life good.
Which one is wealthy? I am not sure the answer is as obvious as we once thought. At this stage, I find myself measuring wealth differently. Can I wake up without an alarm clock? Can I move around reasonably well? Do I have people I genuinely enjoy talking with? Is there somebody I can call at 10 o’clock at night without wondering whether I am disturbing them? Can I still laugh? Can I learn something new? Can I sit quietly without needing to be entertained? Do I have useful work that gives me a reason to get up in the morning? Can I choose how I spend a significant part of my day? That sounds increasingly like wealth to me.
I Am Not Finished
Now, don’t misunderstand me. I am not suggesting that at 75 we should sit on the veranda, fold our hands and wait for the ancestors to send transportation. Not at all. I still have things I want to do. There are articles I want to write, conversations I want to have, places I would like to see, ideas I want to test and people I hope I can still help. I am curious about what comes next.
The Best is Yet to Come is not simply a slogan I put at the bottom of an article. I believe it. But I am beginning to think that ambition should mature as we mature. At 35 the question may be: What can I acquire?
At 50: What can I achieve?
At 65: What can I secure?
At 75, perhaps another question deserves more attention: What can I contribute? That may be one of the differences between becoming old and becoming an elder. Age happens automatically. Eldership does not.
The Audit at 75
There is an exercise I have been doing, sometimes consciously and sometimes not. I look at the things I still want and ask: Why do I want this?
Do I actually need it?
Will it improve my life?
Will it bring me pleasure?
Will it allow me to help somebody?
Or am I still running a race that, for me, should have ended years ago?
That last possibility deserves serious consideration. Some of us have been climbing the ladder for so long that we have forgotten to look out the window. There comes a point when another rung may be less important than enjoying the view. And at 75, time has become different for me. There is almost certainly less of it ahead than behind. That is not pessimism. That is mathematics. And there is something wonderfully clarifying about the mathematics of 75.
I don’t want to waste too much of whatever time remains chasing things I don’t need, impressing people I don’t particularly care about, attending meetings I don’t want to attend or fighting for positions that somebody else should probably have by now. I am becoming less interested in more. More interested in better.
Better conversations. Better relationships. Better use of my mornings. Better care of my body. Better experiences. Better work. More laughter. More peace.
And maybe a little more time doing absolutely nothing without feeling guilty about it. The tragedy, it seems to me, would not be leaving this world without accumulating enough. The greater tragedy might be accumulating far more than enough and reaching the end without ever understanding what all of it was supposed to be for. Because however much we acquire, however powerful we become and however impressive the titles before or after our names – we still can’t take it with us. Maybe that was never the assignment. Maybe the assignment was to decide, while we are still here, what we are going to leave behind.
A MindSpa Question
If you already have enough to live comfortably for the rest of your life, what are you still chasing – and why? And perhaps the harder question: What would have to happen for you to finally say, “I have enough”?
Dr. Leahcim Semaj
Transformational Psychologist
Semaj MindSpa
The Best is Yet to Come.