The Art of Enough

Why Living a Simple Life Has Become So Difficult in the Modern World

There is something bizarre happening in modern life. We seem unable to live a simple life anymore without deliberately being willing to contradict everything around us.

Imagine this. If the definition of a good life — by universal norm — is decent health, mastery of some knowledge or skill, freedom from financial constraint (entirely different from reaching a particular net-worth figure), and a preferred social circle around you — then the essential acts of that good life are simple, are they not?

Train the body. Keep the diet simple. Focus proportionately on the career. Optimise financial behaviour. Top it up with the company of people who keep you connected.

What else could there be?

Unfortunately — as simple as they seem — the current capitalist economy, hyper-exposure, and algorithmic culture bombard you with a thousand components all saying the same thing:

You are not enough.

So the simple equation — health, mastery, wealth, relationship — blurs. Or worse: it remains a hidden treasure in the fog of alluring vanity, in all its forms.

If you read Renaissance Flâneur, you will know I have nothing against capitalism. I am an advocate of it. But the question of why it has become so hard to live a simple, great life in the modern world — why it feels like swimming against the tide — is worth investigating. And worth elaborating further, on how one might reach that state without pretending the inevitable natures of this age do not exist.

Actor ‘Jack Lemmon’ in Billy Wilder’s The Apartment (1960)

Back to those words. You are not enough, whispered constantly by the modern world. Here is what it actually looks like.

• You make some money, and not long after, you realise you need more.

• You buy a decent object, and there is already a better one on the way — or waiting further up the value ladder the brand built for exactly this purpose.

• You finally reach a goal you chased for years, and instead of satisfaction, you look around and find somebody already ten steps ahead.

And social media makes it worse.

Because now you are not comparing your life to the people around you. You are comparing your ordinary, not-so-glamorous Tuesday morning to the best moments of several hundred other lives, within ten minutes.

The harsh truth is that this is the nature of consumption, of human beings, and of how capitalism works best: by keeping you slightly dissatisfied. A person who genuinely believes I have enough is incredibly difficult to sell things to. So everywhere you look, there is another message telling you that you were meant to have more than this.

And eventually even the things that were supposed to make life enjoyable become another form of work.

Exercise becomes numbers tracked in Strava. Reading becomes an annual target to post. Travel becomes content, an asset for status comparison. A hobby becomes a side hustle, far from the genuine pursuit of mastery for its own sake.

Suddenly you are optimising your entire existence instead of experiencing it.

Which is why living simply today takes a surprising amount of courage. Because you have to become comfortable with being unimpressive.

Be alright with the older car. With earning enough rather than endlessly chasing more. With saying no to the opportunity that offers status but takes your time. With letting other people misunderstand what you are doing with your life.

Because if you never decide what enough means for you, the modern world will decide it for you.

Which leaves the larger question. What should enough actually look like?

“Annunciazione”, Leonardo da Vinci.

You have heard the term Renaissance Man.

It is an ideology — idealistic, for some. But look past the surface reading of it, the polyglot who plays three instruments, keeps an athletic body, understands markets, and quotes Proust at dinner. Underneath, it is something much plainer.

Learn something. Make something. Understand something. Love someone. Develop your body. Encounter beauty. Explore nature. Read history. Learn an instrument. Understand technology. Have conversations. Build things. Help people. Sit quietly sometimes.

It sounds like plenty, does it not?

But trust me — it is entirely different from climbing the echelon of status or gathering social clout. Which, incidentally, has shifted: no longer cars and salaries, but books read per year, languages learned, countries visited, skills acquired.

This is something else. It is about expanding the territory of your experience.

And the surprising part is what happens when you realise the Renaissance Human is a way of living that explores without needing to possess.

Encounter mathematics without needing to become a mathematician. Paint without needing to become an artist. Study philosophy without needing to become a philosopher. Train the body without needing to make it your identity.

Then you might find that among all of it, there are one or two things at which you are genuinely masterful. Several at which you are competent. And a good number at which — having explored them fully — you remain hilariously mediocre.

And that is life.

Let’s consider these three figures.

Françoise Hardy center was unmistakably music: singer, songwriter, interpreter, an icon with a very particular aesthetic sensibility.

But Hardy also wrote extensively…memoir, fiction, and books dealing with astrology, and also had a serious, long-running interest in astrology. What’s interesting isn’t whether those secondary pursuits matched her musical importance.

They clearly didn’t need to.

She was allowed to be Françoise Hardy the great Parisian musician while simultaneously being Françoise Hardy the person who writes, thinks, reads, and becomes absorbed in strange subjects.

Or consider the legendary guitarist - Brian May.

Sure — he became one of rock’s most recognizable guitarists with Queen, but astronomy wasn’t some celebrity hobby he picked up after becoming wealthy. May studied physics and mathematics and began doctoral research in astrophysics before Queen’s success interrupted it.

Decades later, behind their heyday, he returned to the work and completed his PhD in astrophysics at Imperial College London in 2007. His secondary pursuit became genuinely serious scholarship. Yet he never needed astrophysics to validate his musical identity, nor music to justify his scientific curiosity.

And the last one…probably the testament to the ideology we’re having — David Lynch.

Many of his films (Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks, Mulholland Drive), his style of wearing the all-buttoned shirt with a tailored jacket — are iconic…considered one of the most distinctive filmmakers of the era…yet - he originally trained as a painter.

Throughout his life, he painted, drew, made photographs, designed furniture, created music, experimented with sound, made short films and animations, and even became intensely interested in things as mundane as coffee and weather reports.

Some of those pursuits produced significant work. Others didn’t need to.

And that’s the point…of embracing the charm of the Renaissance ‘Human,’ which is a direct synchronization with the ‘know-how’ of embracing simplicity in this age.

A Still Image from Michelangelo Antonioni’s “La Notte” (1961)

A simple life, by definition, is life without decoration. And if the problem is that everything around us gets turned into a vanity affair of optimisation, metrics, and milestones with no end — then the charm of an actual simple life is that it makes ordinary life feel spacious again.

Imagine someone whose life, from the outside, is not especially dramatic.

They work. They have a modest home. They cook. They walk. They see a handful of friends. They are not constantly travelling somewhere exotic. They are not trying to become famous. Their possessions are unremarkable.

Then you actually meet them.

There is a half-finished oil painting on the desk. They are reading something about the fall of Constantinople. They know enough astronomy to point out Saturn. They make one wonderful Roman pasta. They play three songs well on guitar and fifteen others badly. They have been learning French for four years and still make ridiculous mistakes. They understand something about mid-century architecture, because they once became curious about why certain rooms feel beautiful. They can repair a broken sink. They occasionally disappear for an entire afternoon because they discovered some obscure filmmaker from the 1960s and cannot let him go.

Alluring, are they not?

When you are no longer desperately accumulating experiences, you can finally taste the ones you are having.

Someone who requires expensive restaurants, constant travel, new purchases, parties, notifications, and entertainment in order to feel alive has a surprisingly fragile relationship with existence. Remove the stimulation and boredom arrives within the hour.

But give the Renaissance Human a library, a notebook, an instrument, a kitchen, a workshop, a bicycle, a garden, a camera — or simply a city to walk through — and there is already far too much to investigate.

Merge the two ideas, the simple life and the Renaissance Human, and what you get is this: reduce what you need, and increase what you can receive from what you already have.

It replaces the modern question — how impressive can I make my life? — with a far more intimate one.

How deeply can I experience the life I actually have?

You no longer need to escape ordinary existence. You make ordinary existence dense with meaning.

A modest apartment can contain an enormous intellectual world. A quiet weekend can hold music, cooking, reading, conversation, craft, discovery. A person can be materially unremarkable and inwardly inexhaustible.

And suddenly simple life begins to sound elegant.

Monica Vitti, Michelangelo Antonioni, Alain Delon; circa 1960s.

The word elegance, widely and superficially used, is often reduced to beauty in simplicity. My own definition goes further.

It is selective complexity — richness without unnecessary complication. (I have elaborated on this fully elsewhere.)

And the Renaissance Human is the other half of the same idea: increasing your capacity to appreciate what already surrounds you.

Because today there are more careers to pursue, more places to go, more things to buy, more skills to learn, more information to consume, more people to follow, and more ways to improve yourself than any person could fit into a single lifetime.

So living simply cannot mean escaping all of it and pretending the modern world does not exist.

It has to mean learning how to choose.

And once you stop trying to keep up with everything, you suddenly have room to become curious again. You can be excellent at one thing, good at a few, and happily mediocre at many. None of it has to become a career, a side hustle, a personal brand, or another achievement to display.

Perhaps that is the elegant answer to the problem of modern life. You do not need to experience everything simply because everything is available.

You choose enough. You keep the external life simple enough that the internal one has room to become enormous.

So instead of asking how much you can fit into a life, you begin asking a different question.

How much life can I find in what I have already chosen?

Which is a way of living that, by the daily act of living it alone, is already worth the fulfilment it brings.