The Myth of Never Enough
Breaking the spell of productivity, perfectionism, and burnout. Where did I learn that rest was unsafe?
I’ve lived inside that spell.
Productivity as penance.
Striving as virtue.
Be a good boy.
Do more.
Get ahead.
Don’t fall behind.
Earn your worth.
Spend your shame.1
Performance wasn’t praised in my world; it was assumed. Excellence was the baseline.
What drew attention wasn’t success but failure. Falling short. Slipping up. Disappointing.
Praise was rare. Correction was swift. And so my nervous system was trained to scan for danger in the silence, for the absence of affirmation. “How do I get validation” became my subconscious mantra.
I remember coming home with a report card full of A’s, and one A-. Yes, I experienced this cliché. I handed it over, heart pounding, waiting for a smile that never came. “What happened here?” my mother asked, tapping the page. The message was clear: there was no reward for doing well, only punishment for falling short. Over time, that silence became louder than any words. It trained me to brace for criticism, to expect disappointment, to pre-empt failure by never slowing down.
Rest became risky. The only safety was forward motion and not expressing too much.
It’s no wonder, then, that I internalized the machinery of the culture around me: industrial, linear, relentless.
The sacred rhythms of the world, the cycle of day and night, the moon’s phases, the pause of weekend, all replaced by the tik-tokking march of time.
We’ve forgotten how to orient ourselves to the organic tempo of life. Time used to be marked by shadows, seasons, and stories. Now it’s managed by calendar notifications and performance dashboards. Even our weekends, meant for recovery, have become arenas of optimization: fitness goals, errands, dinners out, inbox-zero sprints by Sunday evening. It’s hard to hear the quiet call of soul when everything around you screams for productivity.
Even nature’s imperfections were scrubbed away: jagged coastlines are smoothed over in maps. The dirt between our toes replaced by polished tile. The randomness of birdsong drowned in traffic. We traded mystery for measurability. Cyclic time for schedule. Soul for system.
And still the system demands more output, more clarity, more consistency, more shine.
But what if I’m inconsistent?
What if I’m soft, or slow, or silent?
Do I still belong?
Can my family, my friends, my community tolerate the truth of me: when I fail, when I pause, when I grieve, when I retreat to shed the skin that no longer fits? Do I only belong when I’m pleasant: performing, producing, pleasing? Or is there space for the full cycle, even the undoing?
Because the truth is: we’re pieced back together in front of the people that broke us.
And healing needs room to unfold without explanation.
This is where I return to the body. To Shiva’s stillness, unmoved and vast. And to Shakti, not frantic or panicked, but awakened through spanda, the subtle tremor of desire that arises when the soil is ready.
Not forced. Not scheduled.
But felt.
Receptivity is not passivity.
It’s fertility.
The land that receives the seed and transforms it.
Receiving is harder than it looks. Especially when you've been conditioned to give, to prove, to earn your place. But I’m learning that being open to stillness, to beauty, to help requires strength too. It’s a hard lesson for someone shaped by the myth of self-sufficiency, raised in the cult of hyper-independence. Receiving is not a collapse into passivity, but a leaning into trust. Into soil. Into the unseen intelligence of the pause before the bloom. The outstretched wings before landing.
I don’t want to be a good little citizen of burnout culture anymore.
I want to be a good enough son.
A good enough friend.
A man who sometimes fails, sometimes stops, sometimes forgets, and still belongs.
Nature doesn’t force her seasons. She doesn’t hurry her becoming. And yet she blossoms, with no need to prove herself.
Lao Tzu said, “He who knows that enough is enough will always have enough.”
But first, I had to see how “never enough” was eating me alive.
Postscript.
If any of this landed, it’s not here to offer ten hacks for healing.
But I can say this: the undoing begins with noticing.
Noticing where you tighten. Where you override your needs. Where rest feels dangerous.
Start there, and maybe ask: What would it look like to feel safe enough to stop?
Some lines are meant to be sat with rather than explained
Thank you Alex. I love Lynn Twists 3 Toxic Myths of Scarcity… been with these distinctions for years. Do you know them? 1. They are more is better 2. There’s not enough and 3. that’s just the way it is. I was in a Sufficiency group for a few years, meditating and using Lynn Twists book: The soul of money as a guide. Curious, if you lead anything like this or if you ever wanna co-do something like this?
I spent years believing rest had to be earned. Even now, I catch myself feeling guilty on quiet mornings, like I’m falling behind some invisible race. What’s strange is that some of my deepest clarity has come when I finally stopped pushing. Sitting by the ocean, stirring a pot of something slow, rereading a poem I once didn’t understand. The world didn’t collapse when I slowed down. Sometimes I think it finally started to make sense.