Why does enough never feel like enough?

The idea in one line

The need to belong is honest. The trouble starts when language points it at a question that can never close, and the way back is to point it at things that can.

How it works

Feeling comes first. We inherit sensitivities: how strongly loss, threat, reward or being left out register. They are old and honest, and they differ from person to person. Much of what sets them off is learned.

Language turns feeling into meaning. It builds meaning at every scale, from an economy to a sentence you say about yourself. And it builds two kinds of question. One has a “for” in it: better at writing, so this essay makes its argument. You can check that, and it can be settled. The other has nothing outside it to answer it: am I enough? A rank works like that. Higher means only not lower. There is always a rung above, and reaching one just moves the eye up. A question with no “for” can’t close however hard you work at it, because nothing out there could ever tell you that you’d arrived.

The world supplies the second kind. We don’t invent these questions alone. Societies make measures, deliver them through what we buy and watch, and now mint them on demand: artificial intelligence can produce a convincing sentence about who you should be faster than you can read it. None of this needs a villain. Measures that never close simply sell better, so they spread.

AI also hands each of us a faster way to climb: a sharper post, a more impressive CV, a better picture of ourselves, in seconds. Pointed at something with a “for” in it, that help closes. The essay makes its argument, and you’re done. Pointed at looking higher than others, it can’t, for the same reason as before: there is always a rung above.

So it comes down to one question you can put to any want, worry or ambition:

Why I’m writing this

When I was about five, my parents were told I was bright but disruptive. At seven I was held back a year for learning difficulties, and the rest of school confirmed it: I failed my exams, retook them and did badly again. I believed the picture of me it gave, and it coloured everything. “Not enough” didn’t feel like a sentence someone had written. It felt like reality.

I carried that verdict for decades, including 25 years in fashion retail, a trade that, in part, sells answers to exactly that question. Underneath it sat another question I couldn’t answer: why me?

The turn came one afternoon in 1998, on a bench at the edge of Tooting Bec Common. I was at university, reading Saussure for an essay on deconstruction. If meaning is built by language rather than found in the world, then so was the voice telling me I wasn’t enough. It wasn’t a report on reality. It was a sentence.

It took me another twenty-seven years to work out how that sentence gets built and why it is so hard to answer. I read widely in self-help, psychology, Buddhism and other contemplative traditions, and philosophy, looking for the answer in what had already been written. I found pieces of it, and some of them helped, but never how they fitted together. Later I began writing essays, using AI as a tool to think with. Those essays, grouped by theme below, are where this began, written before the book. The book has since moved away from some of what they argue.

The framework is my attempt to fit those pieces together, and it is now becoming a book, working title The Syntax of Abundance. It is built with AI as a tool in the writing itself; the thinking, the lived material and the judgement are mine. There’s more on that, and on me, on the About page.

• Agency & Sovereignty
• Patterns of Behaviour
• Perception & Reframing
• Relational Depth & Belonging
• Change & Transition
• AI Amplification
• Creativity in Abundance

My photographs are on the Photography page.