Never Retire: What Is Enough?
A question I keep asking—and why the answer isn’t just financial.
Lately in Never Retire, I’ve been writing about what it feels like to live the type of life that works for me. Not the American or some other dream. But a life that doesn’t burn me out. One that keeps me engaged and excited.
At the core of that system are a few recurring ideas:
Structure > hustle
Rhythm > optimization
Enough > more
Movement > motivation
A life you don’t need to recover from
Work, money, and fitness integrated—not competing with or taking from one another
Living to 100 as a passion, not a pipe dream
All of this starts with a deceptively simple question:
What does enough look like—for you?
Not just financially. But emotionally. Physically. In the day to day of doing life.
What’s enough work? Enough income? Enough movement? Enough rest? Enough social interaction? Enough time?
This post is about redefining that number. Not to shrink your life, but to give it shape.
Most of Us Don’t Know the Answer
We think of enough as a number. A salary or bank balance. Something concrete and aspirational.
But that number keeps changing. You get close and it moves. You hit it and still feel behind. Or you reach it, then realize you’ve organized your life around the wrong thing.
That’s the runaway American dream.
It’s not just about making a living or chalking up accomplishments. It’s about building a life that doesn’t drain you every time you try to sustain it.
It Changes
The number. The rhythm. The structure.
It used to be all about the hustle. Now, it’s about sustainability. Making room and time for what matters.
This doesn’t mean I’ve stopped pushing. Or that I never hit a wall.
Sometimes there’s fatigue—not from work itself, but from the slow buildup of too many things that are good without enough space for the things that are essential.
Like learning Spanish—really learning it. Not just scraping by or repeating the same broken conversations, but actually building fluency. That takes time and a flow—an intellectual and mental capacity—I haven’t established nearly as well as I thought or had hoped.
Or just having unscheduled time—on a bench, in the park, wandering doing nothing but existing in the city I moved to partly so I could do nothing and feel good about it.
These aren’t big problems. But they still matter.
The lesson for me is that enough isn’t just about how much you earn or how hard you work. It’s about the things you don’t do when the balance slowly creeps out of whack.
That’s the thing about enough. You don’t just find it once and lock it in. You have to keep checking in. Rebalancing. Asking, is this still working?
Sort of like an investment portfolio. More than a few people who own stocks or ETFs find themselves with too many or too much of the same name(s). Great problem to have because the stock market leaders have driven big broad market gains. However, it’s good practice to rebalance your holdings, bringing the allocations in line with your original and long-term sustainable targets.
Sometimes you just need to pull back and re-center. Not some big dramatic show. Just a little rebalance.
Not because you’re failing, but because you’re evolving.
Before I wrap this up…
That mural I shared above—the man checking his watch after the train line shuts down—says everything.
It’s where this story ends and where the deeper meaning of “enough” begins.
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