More on Enough
“If you plan on being anything less than you are capable of being, you will probably be unhappy all the days of your life.” ― Abraham Maslow
I walked by an individual sleeping on the sidewalk this morning. Dirty, unkempt, and seemingly sleeping soundly, he posed no threat to my physical safety. I can’t say the same for my emotional and psychological state. While unfortunately not at all uncommon, witnessing others in crisis is unsettling and upsetting. Can humans truly be unbothered by such suffering? Should we be?
As we tend to do, I noticed him, averted my eyes, and kept moving. Feeling grateful for my personal safety in the presence of someone who was not, attempting to reconcile my human desire to help—that internal urging to do something but minus a solution or means—with powerlessness that feels shameful. How could I possibly experience enough when others, like this man, have so little?
It has been widely reported recently that 60% of Americans—headlines consistently refer to “the bottom 60%” instead of the majority—are not earning enough to afford a basic standard of living. The analysis conducted by the Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity (LISEP) looked beyond daily necessities like food and shelter and considered ability to pay for things like health and child care, higher education, and technology tools necessary for work and school.
“Traditional headline economic indicators like GDP and unemployment tell us the economy is thriving, but they don’t reflect the lived reality of most Americans,” LISEP Chairman Gene Ludwig said. “Americans are working harder than ever, fueling our economic growth, but the benefits of that hard work are not being distributed in a way that supports upward mobility for too many middle- and low-income Americans."
According to LISEP, the cost of basic economic security in the U.S. increased 98.5% from 2001 to 2023. Meanwhile, median earnings for most Americans decreased approximately 4% during that same period when adjusted for inflation. Unfortunately, the gap between how much many families earn and how much they need to afford a minimum cost of living is expected to keep widening.
Is it any wonder so many are questioning our worth?
In her now viral imposter-syndrome-is-the-new-bicycle-face 2023 Smith College commencement speech, Reshma Saujani points out that imposter syndrome assumes those of us who experience it are the problem, rather than the systems—educational, societal, employment—that support and foster inequalities. “When I showed up at that fancy corporate law firm for the very first time, I had not just one but two Ivy League postgraduate degrees. Still I felt like everybody was speaking a different language,” she says. “Big law firms were built by and for people who didn’t look like me…It’s normal to feel like you don’t fit in when you don’t fit in.”
Is it possible to truly feel enough at a time in history when enough is increasingly out of reach? Perhaps so many of us are questioning our worth not because of anything inherently lacking in us but because having enough feels less and less secure and attainable.
Abraham Maslow’s widely accepted hierarchy of needs theorizes that humans cannot achieve higher psychological states of belonging, self-esteem and self-actualization until our basic needs are met. Unfortunately, those basic needs are increasingly out of reach for many.
Perhaps, like imposter syndrome, our insecurities and doubts about being enough are a normal response to external forces and realities rather than a personal failing or neurotic overthinking.