Choosing "Enough" in an Age of More!
Why my word of the year is a full sentence, a boundary, and a tiny act of civil disobedience
Word of the Year…
Every January, I settle in with a smooth pour of Glenlivet 12 and my phone to witness the great annual tradition: watching everyone pick a word that will definitely not survive contact with March.
One friend chooses “abundance.”
Another goes with “alignment.”
Someone always picks “grace,” usually after a year that involved exactly none.
This year, I paused longer than usual to think about my word. I felt tired in a very specific way, as if my entire being needed to be taken apart and reassembled.
What’s my word?
“Transformation”? Hell no.
“Confidence”? Already got plenty, thanks.
“Patience”? Ummmm, have you met me lately?
The word needs to honor who I am today.
How about….?
One syllable. A period baked in.
I think we have a winner, dear readers.
Why Enough?
The word “enough” has a long, slightly rebellious history. It shows in Chaucer’s Middle English, and in the Wife of Bath, a woman who insists on the authority of her lived experience.
It appears in the King James Bible: “Give us this day our daily bread”- not a month’s supply. Just enough for today.
It fueled labor movements and civil rights chants. “We’ve been ‘buked, and we’ve been scorned,” sang freedom marchers, but they also sang “Ain’t gonna let nobody turn me around”- a declaration that enough injustice was enough.
No Medals for Misery
In 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that technological progress would give us a fifteen-hour workweek and the central human problem would be how to fill our leisure time.
We solved the productivity part. We ignored the “stop” part. Keynes assumed we would recognize when enough was enough. Boy, was he wrong!
Today, Americans work more hours than workers in most other wealthy nations. According to OECD data, the United States averages roughly 1,800 hours worked per year, significantly higher than Germany at around 1,350. We are not winning any prizes here. We are just very, very tired.
Kurt Vonnegut once told a story about his friend Joseph Heller at a billionaire's party. Vonnegut mentioned that their host had made more money in a single day than Heller's novel Catch-22 had earned in its entire history. Heller's response was, "Yes, but I have something he will never have: enough."
“Enough” is what you say when your inbox hits triple digits before 10 am oatmeal. It is what you think when someone says, “Just one more thing,” and that thing is never ever small.
We live in an era of more.
More content.
More metrics.
More productivity hacks to squeeze another drop out of an already dry sponge.
As Yuval Noah Harari has argued, we’ve gained godlike powers without gaining godlike contentment. Progress wasn’t the problem. Knowing when to stop was.
The Greeks had a word for it. Sophrosyne. Moderation. Balance.
Aristotle argued that virtue lived in the mean between excess and deficiency. Courage sat between cowardice and recklessness. Somewhere along the way, we decided excess was a personality trait.
The Infinity Lie
Even our self-help books betray us. Atomic Habits tells us that small changes compound. True. But compound toward what? James Clear never promised infinity. He promised improvement. We renamed the loop and convinced ourselves it was forward motion.
“Enough” pushes back.
It asks a dangerous question in a culture built on endless scaling.
What if this is sufficient?
What if the job is good enough?
The relationship stable enough.
The article finished enough.
The self WHOLE enough.
That question terrifies systems that depend on dissatisfaction. Advertising alone is a trillion-dollar industry globally. Its core business model is convincing YOU that what you have is NOT enough.
Politics runs on the same fuel. A population that feels "enough" is harder to mobilize, harder to frighten, harder to promise the moon. Politicians need us hungry, anxious, convinced that we're falling behind—behind other countries, behind our immigrant neighbors, behind some imagined version of ourselves. An exhausted, insecure electorate is an obedient one. Right Donald?
We're too busy trying to keep up to ask hard questions about where we're actually going. "Enough" is a civic threat because it creates that space for discernment. And discernment is very dangerous to anyone selling easy answers to manufactured crises.
The late David Foster Wallace said it best, “The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline.” Enough is an attention word. It changes the focus.
Collapse by Excess
The lesson is almost always delivered after the damage is done. The Roman Empire did not collapse because it lacked ambition. It collapsed because it had no off switch. There was endless expansion, endless consumption, endless complexity.
Historian Joseph Tainter argued that societies collapse when the cost of complexity exceeds the benefits. Enough is that reducer.
There is a wonderful line in Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus. “The struggle itself is enough to fill a man’s heart.” Camus did not say the summit. He said the struggle.
So this year, when the group chat asks for my word, I will not hesitate. Enough.
When someone asks what I mean, I will tell them it is a small rebellion against the cult of more and the latest batch of 2026 bullshit.
And if that makes me sound difficult, so be it.
History tends to be kind to people who know when to stop.
What’s your word for this year?
As a heads-up, I’ll be offline from February 1 to February 22.
I know, I know.
I’m heading home to visit my family in Trinidad and Tobago.
For those just joining my publication, I’m an island girl at heart, from the land of Steelpan, Soca, Carnival, and doubles.
So look… Trinidad isn’t just some distant place. It lies 7 miles (11 km) off the northern coast of Venezuela, with the Venezuelan shoreline visible on clear days from places like Icacos on the southern tip of Trinidad.
That closeness matters.
As Venezuela has endured one of the largest displacement crises in the hemisphere, with millions fleeing economic and political collapse, Trinidad and Tobago has taken in one of the highest per‑capita concentrations of Venezuelan migrants in the Caribbean.
That’s 50,000 Venezuelan refugees and asylum seekers living there alongside its roughly 1.2 million residents.
Because of the short sea routes and geographic proximity, any instability that drives Venezuela is felt in my country FIRST.
My sister called me on December 27th. She heard fighter jets overhead. Most people there knew something was coming for months, even if they didn't want to believe it. Then it happened. America invaded and captured Maduro.
Trinidad and Tobago is, for all its problems, a happy-go-lucky place. We are a people who invented an entire musical instrument from oil drums discarded by colonial powers. We listen to happy music, soca. The people do not want to become collateral damage in someone else's fuckery.
And yet, come this Carnival season (which is another reason I’m going), this tiny twin‑island republic becomes one of the most exquisite cultural epicenters in the world.
To this administration, I say, ENOUGH!
New Publication Alert!
For anyone who knows me: politics and history are my favorite rabbit holes. I’ve usually shared that writing on Medium, but I’ve created a separate publication here for it.
Why Doubles & Democracy?
Doubles is Trinidad street food made of contradictions. Democracy is a system built on them.
I’m still working out the logistics, but the first article drops tomorrow at 7 a.m. PST if you’d like to check it out.
Thank you so much for reading!
Shout-out to KCH for keeping me caffeinated!
WorkmanShit is a reader-supported publication.
To support my whisky habit, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
No cash? No problem!
Smashing that ❤️ button or sharing this post keeps the wheels on this greasy hamster wheel, too.
This is so wonderful! Enough contains a universe. Gandhi said there is enough for everyone's need but not for everyone's greed. You picked an evocative word!
I’m drawn to "enough". I think I’ll claim it as my word of the year too!
It holds a beautiful duality, doesn't it? In moments of abundance, when your heart is full and you realize you are, simply, enough. Yet it also stands in the darker hours, a shield you can raise when you need to scream, "Enough!"
I like keeping that door open :) to gratitude AND to boundaries.
Thank you Neela!