On Abundance and Enough: A Think Piece
By Julia Henley
There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes not from scarcity but from too much. Too many choices, too many channels, too many opinions arriving at too high a velocity. We are, by most material measures, the most abundantly provisioned people who have ever lived. And we are not, by most measures, doing particularly well.
This is not a new observation. But it is one worth sitting with, because the dominant response to it — more productivity, more optimization, more tools to manage the overwhelm — seems to be making things worse.
I want to suggest a different frame. Not minimalism, which has become its own kind of consumption. Not nostalgia, which mistakes the past for something it never quite was. But something closer to discernment — the old-fashioned practice of asking, before acquiring or adopting or subscribing: is this actually good? Good for me, good for my community, good for the places I love?
The Brave New World of the title is not Huxley's exactly, though his novel remains eerily prescient. It is the world we are actually building — one algorithm, one platform, one "disruption" at a time. A world of extraordinary technical capability deployed in the service of remarkably thin purposes.
What would it mean to want less, but better? To build communities that are genuinely worth living in, rather than merely convenient? To measure progress by the health of our rivers and the strength of our neighborhoods rather than by the growth of our portfolios?
These are not rhetorical questions. They are design questions. And they are the questions this column intends to keep asking.