The beauty of enough and the importance of choice

We are all familiar with this Tolstoy story.  How much land a person needs?  The protagonist of the story is a peasant named Pahom, who overhears his wife and sister-in-law argue over the merits of town and peasant farm life. He thinks, “if I had plenty of land, I shouldn’t fear the Devil himself!”.

However, Pahom then becomes very possessive of his land, and this causes arguments with his neighbors. “Threats to burn his building began to be uttered.” Later, he moves to a larger area of land at another Commune. Here, he can grow even more crops and amass a small fortune, but he has to grow the crops on rented land, which irritates him. Finally, after buying and selling a lot of fertile and good land, he is introduced to the Bashkirs and is told that they are simple-minded people who own a huge amount of land. Pahom goes to them to buy as much of their land for as low a price as he can negotiate. Their offer is very unusual: for a sum of one thousand rubles, Pahom can walk around as large an area as he wants, starting at daybreak, marking his route with a spade along the way. If he returns to his starting point by sunset that day, all the land his route encloses will be his, but if he does not reach his starting point, he will lose his money and receive no land. He is delighted, believing he can cover a great distance, and has chanced upon the bargain of a lifetime. That night, Pahom experiences a surreal dream in which he sees himself lying dead by the feet of the Devil, who is laughing.

He stays out as late as possible, marking out land until just before the sun sets. Toward the end, he realizes he is far from the starting point and runs back as fast as he can to the waiting Bashkirs. He finally arrives at the starting point just as the sun sets. The Bashkirs cheer his good fortune, but exhausted from the run, Pahom drops dead. His servant buries him in an ordinary grave only six feet long.

How much is enough for you is an ancient question. However, most people do not have an answer for it and end up like Pahom, losing everything.  One reason for this inability to understand what is enough is the human desire to consume everything. Uncontrollable greed has led to wars and much misery for humanity. We crave more of everything and are made to believe that the more we possess, the more we will be happy.  In an interesting interview for a research, a six-year-old child answered.  My three wishes would be never to die, be the richest person in the world, and have all the video games. If the question of how much is enough was challenging in an age of scarcity, it is even more difficult now, where we live in an apparent abundance of everything.

Though the desire to possess is a very strong one, the reality is that we can never possess everything in this world. On the other hand, the very desire to have everything can spoil your happiness.  When you chase a career with a huge salary, you may be sacrificing your family life or your creative pursuits. How much ever wealth you have, there will always be people who are richer than you. Thus, contentment in life becomes a  noble value to pursue. We have heard about the hedonic treadmill. According to this, whenever we try to gain more happiness by buying more, we return to the earlier levels and never reach the perfect moment of joy.

As we mentioned earlier, we live in an age of abundance. We have a  plethora of choices and things to consume. Entertainment, wealth, information, we have a plenty of everything. Amid all this abundance, what is scarce is our attention. We are still mortals with a limited lifespan.  Accordingly, choosing the things we want to pay attention to is one of the essential skills we should master in this age. When information was scarce, we chased it as more information was always advantageous for survival. However, the scenario is different today. We are exposed to tons and tons of information/data every second. It was interesting to read an analogy between sugar and information recently. (https://gurwinder.substack.com/p/the-intellectual-obesity-crisis )We evolved to seek sugar because it was a source of energy. However, when we learned to produce sugar on an industrial scale, our love of sweet became a liability.  This is the same case with information. It was curiosity that helped us to evolve and become the most intelligent species. Today, in our attention economy, low quality information -junk information- is easy to produce and highly addictive. Since it can also satisfy our curiosity, men tend to consume it incessantly and become intellectually obese. So continuously, we develop outrage/excitement and an illusion of knowledge. It is perfectly possible that we spend countless hours on the Internet and remain stupid. Thus today, one of the most important choices we have to make is which information we want to consume and which we want to ignore. To put it more broadly, what we want to experience and what we should happily abandon in our life.

Man is an ambitious animal. Seneca wrote, “ You act like mortals in all that you fear and like immortals in all that you desire.” There is nothing wrong with having desires, and you need desires to move on in life. However, calamity is when our desires and insatiable greed consume us. We must also remember that our desires and capacity to consume are limited by our perishable bodies and time. Those who cannot discover what is enough for them forsake a balanced life. Similar is the case with one’s inability to make the right choices. Every moment of our lives, demands a conscious choice from us. How we want to spend our wealth, with whom we want to share our time, how to fill each day, and so on and on. We don’t have all the time to experience all that this world offers. Our chase after more should not distract us from the beauty of enough and the importance of choice to make this life more beautiful and meaningful.