The Weight of Enough: An Argument Against More

Every hiker learns the same arithmetic on the first steep hill. The pack that seemed so reasonable on the kitchen floor, where each item was weighed one at a time and each seemed light, becomes on the trail a single accumulated argument against you. Nothing in it is heavy. All of it together is. I want to make a case that a household's money works on precisely this principle, and that the word our whole economy is organized to sell us, the little word more, is not a prize at all. It is a pack. Scripture has been telling us its weight for a very long time, and it has also been telling us, with great tenderness, the name of the lighter way.

"But godliness with contentment is great gain."

1 Timothy 6:6 (KJV)

First, Let Us Agree on What the Words Mean

Arguments about money usually go wrong in the first sentence, because nobody has stopped to define the terms. So let us be unfashionably careful and do it now, before the arithmetic, because the arithmetic will behave itself once the words do.

By enough I mean a number, not a feeling. Enough is what it actually costs, in dollars per month, to house your household, feed it, clothe it, insure it, move it about, keep its promises, and grant it a modest ration of honest pleasure, with a margin left over for the roof that will one day leak whether you have planned for it or not. A family can sit down on a Tuesday evening with a pencil and last quarter's bank statements and find this number in about an hour. It differs from street to street and from season to season of life, but for any given household in any given year it exists, and it is knowable. That is the first surprising thing about enough: it can be written down.

By more I mean something stranger. Notice that more is a comparative, and comparatives are supposed to be on their way somewhere. Taller is headed toward tallest, and older toward oldest. But more, as our advertising uses the word, has quietly amputated its superlative. There is no amount called most that the chase recognizes, no shelf where the ladder ends and a man may step off and put the kettle on. More is not a destination you have so far failed to reach. It is a direction, and a direction cannot be reached at all, any more than a man can arrive at north.

The Preacher of Ecclesiastes made this observation about three thousand years before the first billboard, and made it colder and better than I can:

"He that loveth silver shall not be satisfied with silver; nor he that loveth abundance with increase: this is also vanity."

Ecclesiastes 5:10 (KJV)

Do notice what the verse does not say. It does not say silver is wicked, and it does not say abundance is shameful. It says the loving of them cannot be fed. The appetite is built like a thirst for seawater: the drinking is the thing that deepens it. If that is true, then the pursuit of more is not merely tiring. It is structurally incapable of delivering what it advertises, the way a circle is structurally incapable of having corners. That is the claim on the table. Let us see whether the numbers agree.

The Arithmetic of Never

A reasonable person might reply that this is poetry, and that in the real world people do reach comfort and stop climbing. The data says otherwise, and says it with a perfectly straight face. The Bureau of Labor Statistics finds that the average American household spends $77,280 a year, against average income before taxes of about $101,805. Meanwhile the national personal saving rate, tracked by the Bureau of Economic Analysis, has spent recent years in the neighborhood of four and five cents kept out of every after-tax dollar. And the Federal Reserve's survey of household well-being finds that only 63 percent of adults could cover a $400 emergency expense with cash or its equivalent, which leaves more than a third of the wealthiest large nation in history rattled by a water pump.

Hold those facts side by side and study them the way you would study a chess position, without hurry and without excuses for either player. We are a country of historically astonishing income, spending nearly all of it, keeping almost none of it, and frightened of a $400 repair. The usual explanation is that everything has gotten expensive, and there is real truth in it; rent and groceries have behaved badly for years, and no honest essay pretends otherwise. But the pattern refuses to stay in the low tax brackets where that explanation would confine it. Households earning $60,000 and households earning $160,000 report much the same sensation of just barely, and the raise that was going to fix everything is annexed within a season by a life that grew to meet it. When spending rises to greet income at every rung of the ladder, the problem is no longer the ladder. It is the climbing itself.

Our Lord compressed the diagnosis into a single sentence, and He framed it, interestingly, not as a scolding but as a warning one traveler gives another about the road ahead:

"And he said unto them, Take heed, and beware of covetousness: for a man's life consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth."

Luke 12:15 (KJV)

Take heed, He says, and beware, as though covetousness were less like a vice and more like a hazard, a loose plank that might drop on anyone, at any income, from any scaffolding. And the reason He gives is a matter of plain fact rather than of taste: your life does not consist in the abundance of your things. Not should not. Does not. A man may disagree, but he is then disagreeing about what a life is made of, and he ought to know that he is.

The Second Price Tag

The argument now needs its next step. So far I have claimed only that more never satisfies. I want to claim something stronger: that more actively charges, and charges in a currency that never appears on the sticker. Every object you buy has two prices. The first is printed. The second is what the thing bills you for the privilege of continuing to own it: the interest if you financed it, the insurance, the upkeep, the square feet it occupies in the garage, and the small standing garrison of attention it demands from a mind that has only so much attention to garrison anything with. A boat is famously a hole in the water that money is poured into, but the humbler examples are the deadlier ones, precisely because there are so many of them and no single one seems worth resisting. Remember the hiker's pack. Nothing in it is heavy.

Take the interest alone, since interest is the easiest weight to put on a scale. The Federal Reserve's consumer credit data shows credit card accounts that carry a balance being charged interest rates in the range of 22 percent a year. Suppose a household carries $6,500, close to the national average per cardholder, and pays a flat $200 a month. The arithmetic is simple and terrible. Freedom arrives in about 50 months, a little over four years, and roughly $3,500 in interest is paid along the way. Nearly ten thousand dollars, surrendered for sixty-five hundred dollars of purchases so old that the household would need to pull the statements to remember what they were. That is the weight of more, measured exactly: you carry yesterday's wants up today's hill, and the finance company charges you by the pound.

Paul, writing to a young pastor about money, described the end of that road with an image so violent that we tend to read past it out of politeness:

"But they that will be rich fall into temptation and a snare, and into many foolish and hurtful lusts, which drown men in destruction and perdition. For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows."

1 Timothy 6:9-10 (KJV)

Pierced themselves through. Notice the reflexive. No enemy does the piercing; the hand on the instrument is the man's own. And notice who is at risk: not the rich, but they that will be rich, that is, anyone whose compass is fixed on more, whatever his current balance. A man on $40,000 can be pierced by the same point as a man on $400,000, because the wound is not made by money. It is made by direction.

The Ten-Year Test

Essays against more usually spoil themselves at this point by staying vague, so let us run a concrete experiment instead. Imagine that a raise of $500 a month lands on your household. Said out loud, it sounds like deliverance, and for a few weeks it is. Now watch what the direction called more does with it. The car quietly becomes one trim level nicer at the next trade. The phone plan fattens. The restaurants improve by a shade. Within a year the raise has been annexed without a single deliberate decision, and the feeling, which is the crucial datum in the whole experiment, the feeling is exactly what it was before. Researchers have tidy names for this drift. You and I may as well call it what it is, which is evaporation.

Now run the alternative. A household that has drawn its line of enough receives the same $500 and treats it not as a raise in living but as a raise in margin. Here is the same money, ten years on, under three different masters:

At a plain 7 percent average annual return, the sort that boring, diversified index investing has historically produced over long stretches (historically, mind, never guaranteed, and honest people always say so), $500 a month grows to roughly $86,500 in ten years. Split the raise down the middle, enjoy half like a sane and grateful person, and the household still banks about $43,000. The point of the table is not that the first household sinned by enjoying its raise. The point is that it never chose at all. More chose for it, silently, the way water chooses the low ground. Contentment, whatever else it turns out to be, begins as the recovery of the choice.

A Skill, Not a Temperament

Here someone always objects that contentment is a lovely disposition for the people born with it, like perfect pitch or an easy digestion, and that the rest of us must simply admire it through the window. The objection dissolves the moment you read Paul carefully, because Paul claims no temperament. He claims an education:

"Not that I speak in respect of want: for I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content. I know both how to be abased, and I know how to abound: every where and in all things I am instructed both to be full and to be hungry, both to abound and to suffer need."

Philippians 4:11-12 (KJV)

I have learned. I am instructed. The words carry a workshop smell: apprenticed, drilled, practiced until the hands know it. And he learned it in both directions, which is worth a pause, because we assume the hard lesson is scarcity. Paul says abundance has its own curriculum, and anyone who has watched a windfall unsettle a family knows he is right. This is enormously encouraging news, because skills can be acquired on purpose by ordinary people. Nobody is born knowing how to be content with a nine-year-old car, any more than anybody is born knowing how to lay bricks. Both are learned the same way: by doing the thing badly, on schedule, until you do it well.

The practice looks unromantic, as real practice always does. It looks like a 30-day pause on any unplanned purchase over $100, kept on a written list where most of the entries quietly expire of natural causes. It looks like unsubscribing from the marketing emails whose entire profession is the manufacture of discontent in you, their raw material. It looks like a deliberate habit of naming, at the table, three things already owned and enjoyed, because gratitude is not a mood that visits but a muscle that answers to exercise. And beneath all of it lies a reason that has nothing to do with technique:

"Let your conversation be without covetousness; and be content with such things as ye have: for he hath said, I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee."

Hebrews 13:5 (KJV)

Mark the logic of that verse, because it is the entire argument in miniature. Be content, it says, and then supplies the ground, and the ground is not that circumstances will improve. The ground is a Presence that will not withdraw. Contentment, for the Christian, is not finally a conclusion about your net worth. It is a conclusion about your God, spilling over onto your net worth.

What Enough Sets Free

I have called more a weight, and fairness now requires me to be equally concrete about what setting it down buys, and to be careful while I am at it, because a lie waits in the ditch on either side of this road. One ditch says money is everything, and builds the treadmill. The other ditch pretends money is nothing, and leaves families unprotected out of a counterfeit spirituality. Scripture walks the crown of the road: money is a tool and a test, never a scorecard of Heaven's affection, and the faithful are not promised comfortable balances. Paul learned his contentment in a prison he had not budgeted for, and no honest teacher will promise you better weather than an apostle got.

What can be said, and said with arithmetic, is that a household which fixes its line of enough and routes the difference acquires three things in a reliable order: first a buffer, then options, then usefulness. Test the shape of it against your own numbers:

A $1,000 start plus $400 a month at 7 percent comes to roughly $130,000 in fifteen years. That figure is not a promise; markets misbehave, jobs end, bodies fail. What the figure is, is a direction reversed. Money now flows toward margin instead of toward appetite, and margin, for a Christian, was never meant to stop at safety. It is the raw material of generosity, and generosity done rightly has a particular temperature:

"Every man according as he purposeth in his heart, so let him give; not grudgingly, or of necessity: for God loveth a cheerful giver."

2 Corinthians 9:7 (KJV)

Cheerful is the word that convicts, because cheerfulness in giving is almost mechanically impossible for the household that has spent itself to the rim. Gifts squeezed out of panic feel like amputations. Gifts poured out of margin feel like what they are, an overflow. The man who has drawn his line of enough is not merely richer in ten years. He is freer on the Tuesday in between, free to meet a neighbor's crisis with his checkbook instead of his sympathy alone. That freedom, not the balance that funds it, is the gain Paul weighed against godliness and found great.

Drawing Your Line

All that remains is to do it, and the doing is pleasantly mechanical. The wisest prayer about money in the whole Bible is also the most practical, because it dares to ask for a quantity:

"Remove far from me vanity and lies: give me neither poverty nor riches; feed me with food convenient for me: Lest I be full, and deny thee, and say, Who is the LORD? or lest I be poor, and steal, and take the name of my God in vain."

Proverbs 30:8-9 (KJV)

Neither poverty nor riches. The writer asks God for enough, by name, and gives his reasons, and both reasons are about staying near God rather than about comfort. No economy will ever print that prayer on a banner, because no economy can sell to a man who has finished shopping. Here is the same prayer translated into procedure:

The raise rule in step three deserves a brief defense, since keeping only a quarter of each raise for lifestyle sounds austere until you watch it run. A worker earning $80,000 who receives ordinary 3 percent raises, and who lets his lifestyle keep 25 cents of each new dollar while routing the rest, will within a decade be setting aside more than $1,500 a month before taxes, without having once felt deprived, because nothing was ever taken from the table. The money simply never arrived there. Willpower is a poor guard and everyone knows it; the raise rule replaces the guard with a wall, and walls do not get tired.

The Lighter Way

Let us end where we began, on the hill, under the pack. Paul finishes his sentence about gain with a reminder that sounds like an accountant reading a ledger at a graveside:

"For we brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out. And having food and raiment let us be therewith content."

1 Timothy 6:7-8 (KJV)

We arrived carrying nothing, and it is certain, his word, that we will leave the same way. The whole of a financial life is conducted between two empty-handed moments, which puts the packing list in a rather different light. Whatever you strap on in the middle must be carried in the middle, all of it, every month, up every hill, and none of it crosses the far gate.

So I have not argued that you should want less because wanting is wicked. Wanting is human, and God is no enemy of pleasure; He invented it, and Scripture is frank about feasts. I have argued something narrower and, I think, harder to escape: that enough is a real number your household can write down this week, that more is not a number at all but a direction without a terminus, and that every mile traveled in that direction is paid for twice, once at the register and once in the carrying. Godliness with contentment is great gain, and the gain is the man himself: unafraid of the envelope in the mailbox, able to hear of a neighbor's new car without a flicker of acid, free to give cheerfully because the gift comes out of margin and not out of meat. The pack was never the prize. The hill was never the enemy. Put it down, walk up light, and see.