Still Not Enough

When I lived in Japan for three years, I learned concepts that have stayed with me for a lifetime. Japan is not uniform. There is the madness of Tokyo life, there are down-to-earth villages, and there are ancient traditions encapsulated in wooden buildings, shoji 障子 screens, and zen 禅 gardens. I gravitate to the last.

What I remember most is the complete attention to the present. I sat through flower arrangement, or ikebana 生け花, and tea ceremony, or sadō 茶道, each an exercise in focusing on the task at hand.

The underlying spirit is to cherish the few things you have, or mottainai もったいない. The well-known concept of beauty in imperfection, or wabi-sabi 侘び寂び, comes to mind. Objects were repaired, reused, used up completely, and reluctantly thrown away. Frugality was not poverty. It was a form of respect. It was not book study; I saw it in the behavior of my friends and of the shopkeeper, mama-san ママさん.

Then I spent years in Chicago, where spending on status symbols was paramount. Later came the suburbs, where the chase is subtler but never stops: constant room renovations, a garage so full of stuff that the car gets pushed out into the driveway. The house that was the dream house at closing is, five years later, downgraded to the old starter house in conversation. All these goals and purchases are far beyond what is necessary to be happy. Suburbia measures its members by the better Joneses. Together, they form a hedonic treadmill.

Hedonic adaptation, as it is called in psychology, is a voice, and in recent years I learned to recognize it in my own life: it echoes “not good enough, not enough”. I watched my worn but beloved antique furniture replaced by modern IKEA versions; an expensive Italian leather sofa set gave way to a square contemporary design. Nothing was worn out. Nothing was broken. It was, in one way or another, simply no longer good enough.

Japan heard the same voice. In the 1980s, at the peak of Japanese economic success, the country was buying the world: Manhattan towers, French paintings at record prices, and the certainty that next year would be richer than this one. The economic bubble burst right before I came to Japan in the early 1990s. A generation had watched what the promise of lifetime employment cost their fathers: working until night, drinking with the bosses, collapsing on the last train home. Some never came home at all; Japan needed a word for death from overwork: karōshi (過労死). Then even the promise dissolved. They weighed the sacrifice against the things it had bought, and asked a question the suburb never asks out loud: what if we returned to the old ways?

Some of them did. Most of Japan still works like crazy, but a growing minority stepped off the treadmill. We call them the satori 悟り generation, after the Zen word for awakening. They rent small apartments, repair what breaks, and share what is rarely used. The workaholic generation looks down on the movement, as if contentment were a symptom. The surveys suggest otherwise: this generation reports greater life satisfaction than their parents did at the same age, despite having less money and fewer material possessions.

They already had the cultural vocabulary. Mottainai, which I had seen practiced decades earlier, is the regret of waste and respect for what a thing is; it shaped Japanese households long before minimalism had a name. Danshari 断捨離 has lately become a trend here too, with television shows about decluttering, but the word deserves better than entertainment. It was coined by Hideko Yamashita, whose book Danshari is in my personal library. The word is written with three characters: dan 断, to refuse, stopping unnecessary things from entering your life; sha 捨, to discard what does not serve you; ri 離, to separate from the obsession with material things. It is not just a decluttering method; it decides what enters your life at all.

The idea is older still, and only today did I find it carved in stone. In the garden of my Aikidō 合気道 center stands a replica of the famous tsukubai つくばい, the stone water basin, from Ryōan-ji temple in Kyoto, shaped like an old Chinese coin. I have walked past it before. Today, while writing this very article, I recognized it. Its square mouth held no water, only fallen leaves. The square hole at its center is the kanji 口, mouth, and each of the four characters carved around the rim borrows that square to complete itself. Read from the top and around, the fragments become four words: I, or ware 吾; only, or tada 唯; enough, or taru 足; to know, or shiru 知. Together they say 吾唯足知, ware tada taru wo shiru: I only know what is enough. Each character is incomplete without the humble square of water at the center, and guests rinsing their hands before the tea ceremony literally draw from enough. At the temple in Kyoto, a bamboo pipe keeps that mouth always full, with a ladle resting across the rim.

[photos: the replica with its fallen leaves, and the Ryōan-ji original with the bamboo pipe]

The teaching traces back through Zen to Laozi, who wrote that the one who knows enough is wealthy; Japan absorbed the line and gave it a name: chisoku 知足, “knowing sufficiency.” When I mentioned the coincidence, my sensei 先生 said: “when we open our eyes, we find things we have never seen before”. The basin had been waiting in that garden the whole time. So had the idea.

The same lesson awaits in the aikidō dōjō 道場. Knowing what is enough is masakatsu agatsu 正勝吾勝; the true victory is victory over oneself: not acquiring more technique or power, but recognizing sufficiency. Today’s class taught exactly this: natural softness in place of strength. Softness, or jū 柔, is the character that also names jūdō 柔道, the gentle way. Too soft, and you collapse under your partner’s weight; too stiff, and it is no longer aikidō. The art lives between: relaxed without collapsing, firm without forcing, only the necessary force in each technique, nothing added, nothing wasted.

I do not promote nihilism, a philosophy of no effort, no ambition, no attention to detail; that would be lying flat, or tangping 躺平, the Chinese refusal that made waves in recent years. Knowing what is enough is not giving up. I have worked my whole career in software to become an architect and a director at a comfortable salary level, and I did not do that by accident. The question is not whether to earn. The question is what the earning is for, and the hedonic treadmill of newer and shinier is the answer that can never be satisfied.

Consumerism cannot sell the one thing people miss most: community. No purchase can fix loneliness, which may be why the treadmill runs so hard; it is easier to buy another thing than to admit what no purchase can provide. When you want company, there’s the bookstore, the cafe, the gym, and, in summer, the beach and the forest trail. But community is not sold; it is built; someone has to say hello first.

What I try to practice is essentialism, not asceticism or deprivation. I am not perfect; the Amazon boxes still arrive more often than I would like to admit. Once a salary exceeds what a life needs, the surplus from avoiding waste can be reinvested. Financial freedom requires a change in personality, not just in income. Mottainai works by changing the question at the shelf: not “Do I want this?” but “Will I use this completely?” Ask it honestly, and the number of purchases falls on its own, and the things you keep are treated with a respect that makes replacement rare.

The last piece is a reason for being, or ikigai 生き甲斐. A person with a purpose has less appetite for escape, distraction, and retail comfort. Purpose itself becomes a form of quiet wealth, the kind that cannot be displayed and never needs upgrading.

We will always hear that this is still not enough. I have learned to answer with the four characters from the garden: I only know what is enough.

Respectfully,

Uki D. Lucas

## Inspiration

- Hideko Yamashita, “Danshari: The Japanese Art of Decluttering Your Space to Transform Your Life”.

- Shizen Style YouTube channel.