Learning What's Enough
Nobody teaches you what enough looks like. They teach you more. More credentials, more status, more things. And I listened.
For years, I spent close to half my salary on brands. Zara, Calvin Klein, Massimo Dutti. Not luxury, because I couldn't afford luxury, but enough brand recognition to get a nod from the people around me. Enough to feel like I belonged. I chose shirts over skills and looking good over being good, and looking good did make me feel good, but only for a while.
I remember walking into a Massimo Dutti store with a few hundred dollars in my bank account. A striped polo caught my eye, blue and white, like a rugby jersey. Ninety-nine dollars. A fifth of everything I had, and I bought it without thinking because it made me look sharp, and looking sharp made me feel like I was somebody.
I wore it maybe twice. Singapore heat doesn't care about brands, and the shirt made me sweat within minutes. It ended up in the back of my wardrobe, forgotten, and eventually thrown out during a purge. Ninety-nine dollars spent on a feeling that didn't last.
That was the pattern. Buy the feeling, wear it briefly, then chase the next one. The only thing that slowed me down was running out of money, and thankfully so, because if I'd had more I would have spent more, and the armour would only have gotten heavier.
The first layer came off almost by accident. Around 2017, I stumbled into the minimalist movement and started throwing things out, and I was stunned by how much I'd hoarded. Not just objects but the stories I'd attached to them. Every item had a reason to stay. "Maybe I'll need this someday" or "this is a core memory I should keep." The KonMari method gave me a way to work through it: hold each thing, ask if it still serves you, and let go if it doesn't.
It took multiple rounds of clearing through everything I'd accumulated since childhood, and somewhere in that process I realised I wasn't just holding onto things. I was being held back by them.
But the physical clutter was only the surface. Underneath, my mind was just as full, absorbing other people's energy, letting external opinions shape my mood and my decisions and my sense of self. Stoicism helped me see that feelings and memories can stop serving you too, and that you can let those go as well. That process was slower, multiple rounds of sitting with things and breaking them down and processing honestly, but each round left me a little lighter.
Then COVID took the stripping further than I'd chosen to go. My entire life compressed into one room, about ten square metres. Eating, sleeping, working, exercising, all within the same four walls and the same routine, day after day. I'd spent years voluntarily peeling away what didn't matter, and now the world was doing it for me.
In that forced simplicity, a question I'd been avoiding started surfacing daily: Is this the life I want to continue living?
I was comfortable and I was safe, but without all the noise and movement I used to fill my days with, comfortable and safe felt hollow.
The question kept coming back and each time I sat with it I dug a little deeper, and the answer was always the same. No. This isn't it. So I calculated what I truly needed, not wanted but needed, and the number was smaller than I thought.
It always is, once you strip away what other people told you was necessary. And with that clarity, I opened a blank document and typed my resignation letter.
I expected regret. What came instead was relief, this quiet confirmation that the decision was right. I had braced myself for doubt, and instead my body just settled. That surprised me more than anything.
A recent health scare sharpened the picture further. When things get serious, you don't think about your network or your net worth or your qualifications. You think about who's beside you, who picked up the phone, who showed up.
These days, I know what enough looks like. A good cup of coffee, a calm roof over my head, good food, the tech I actually use, and the people who matter. My wife, my family, my close friends.
I still don't know exactly what I want, but I've shed enough of what I don't want to see more clearly. The brands, the clutter, the noise, the need for safety, layer by layer, I've been letting go of everything I thought I was supposed to be.
There's a word for that, I think. Unbecoming.
And what's left, finally, is enough.