Have We Become Citizens of the Country of Not Enough?

Clicks, likes, and applause don’t define your worth.

Photo by fikry anshor on Unsplash

In South Africa, I met a man who told me he’d rather commit seppuku than live in Los Angeles. I asked him where he lived and he said he didn’t live anywhere in particular, but he spent most days along the Florida Panhandle. Drinking in dive bars, he staggered into all-nighters that sold fried chicken, Nikes, and Jim Beam. Living as though he could die at any moment.

He was straight out of a Chuck Palahniuk novel with his blowtorch hair, threadbare trousers, and a penchant for self-destruction. He had the war wounds to prove it. A scar that traveled from the nape of his neck to his stomach. The missing back teeth. The jowls primed for a meat hook. Save for the blurry photos of bar fights and paunchy men toasting to last call, he said he spends his life off of his phone rather than on it.

Imagine that. Setting down your phone. Saying, I don’t need you. Meaning it.

In all the photos he looked as though he’d been kicked in the face a few hundred times. He was a walking wound, body bruised — his face a mess of pain. There was the photo of a cracked jaw and beer bottle glass glinting in his hair. But the pride, there was no mistaking it. Smiling, he pointed to the pictures and said this is real. While everyone is ring-lighting and face-filtering, you could see how a history of hurt had aged him. He was lipstick that had been kissed off one too many times.

Yet, he was unafraid of being ignored and ugly.

We live in a world where more is lauded. Something is deemed brilliant and beautiful only if the crowds read it, saw it, and approved of it. Attention and the steady numerical uptick are the currency of our worth. We are nothing if not pitiful if our words go unread, our photos broadcasting that one lone like. We are desperate for validation only a screen and a stranger’s approval could provide.

In an extraordinary essay, “The Ant, the Grasshopper, and the Antidote to the Cult of More: A Lovely Vintage Illustrated Poem About the Meaning and Measure of Enough,” Maria Popova writes:

“Kurt Vonnegut exposed the taproot of our modern suffering as the gnawing sense that what we have…