The Greeks had a precise diagnosis for the condition that defines our age. They called it pleonexia — the desire for more, the wanting that has no natural limit, the reaching that cannot stop because it does not know what it is reaching for. They considered it not merely a practical error but a moral failure and a spiritual one: the condition of the person who has confused the instrument with the end, the means with the good, and — most fundamentally — the accumulated thing with the self that is doing the accumulating. Two and a half thousand years later, the diagnosis has not been improved upon. The condition has simply gotten worse.
By Bergotte
There is a detail in the storage unit industry’s own promotional literature that stops you cold when you encounter it. The United States currently has more than fifty thousand self-storage facilities — more storage facilities than it has McDonald’s restaurants, more than it has public schools, more, by a considerable margin, than it has public libraries. Approximately one in ten American households rents a storage unit. The industry generates more than forty billion dollars in annual revenue. It is one of the fastest growing sectors of the American economy, and it has been growing steadily for four decades, through recessions and recoveries and the various disruptions that have reshaped almost everything else.
The things in those units are not, for the most part, items of genuine practical value that cannot fit in the home. They are the overflow of homes that are already larger, per person, than any homes in human history — the surplus of accumulation that has exceeded even the enlarged capacity of the enlarged dwelling to contain it. They are the physical record of the wanting that did not stop when the need was met, that continued past sufficiency into a territory that sufficiency cannot describe, that accumulated past the point of use into the point of storage and then past the point of storage into the point of paying someone else to store what you are no longer using and may never use again but cannot bring yourself to release.
This is the condition the ancient Greeks diagnosed as pleonexia, and it is not a condition they considered trivial or merely impractical. They considered it — Epicurus most precisely, but Aristotle and the Stoics and Socrates before them — one of the fundamental moral failures available to a human being: the failure of the person who does not know what enough is, and therefore does not know what anything is for, and therefore does not know who he is.
Epicurus and the Limit That Is Not There
Epicurus built his entire philosophy around a distinction that the storage unit industry has spent forty billion dollars a year helping people avoid making: the distinction between the desires that have a natural limit and the desires that do not.
The natural and necessary desires — for food when hungry, for water when thirsty, for shelter from cold, for the companionship of friends — have a specific, identifiable limit. The hunger that drives the desire for food is satisfied when the hunger is gone. The limit is built into the desire itself: the desire arises from a specific lack, points toward a specific satisfaction, and dissolves when the satisfaction is achieved. These desires can be met, reliably and without great difficulty, by a life of modest sufficiency. The person who has enough to eat, enough to drink, a roof over her head, and genuine friends to share the evening with has, in Epicurus’s account, everything that genuine pleasure requires. She is, in the most precise philosophical sense, satisfied — in a state of ataraxia, of undisturbed tranquillity, that is the highest condition available to a mortal being in an indifferent universe.
The vain and empty desires — for wealth beyond sufficiency, for fame, for the accumulation of things beyond use, for the specific pleasures that convention has convinced us we need — have no natural limit. They arise not from a specific lack in the natural order of the body and the soul but from a distortion produced by convention, by comparison with others, by the social world’s systematic conflation of more with better and accumulation with worth. They cannot be satisfied because there is no natural point of satisfaction built into them — no hunger that disappears when fed, no thirst that dissolves when quenched. They are the desires of the person who wants more not because he lacks something specific but because more has become the measure of enough, and more is always exceeded by still more, and the horizon always recedes.
“To whom little is not enough,” Epicurus wrote, “nothing is enough.” The sentence is not a paradox. It is a diagnosis. The person for whom little is not enough is the person who has not understood what little is for — who has not made the distinction between the genuine goods that a modest sufficiency provides and the conventional goods that accumulation promises and cannot deliver. He is not a person of large appetite. He is a person of confused appetite — a person whose desires have been so thoroughly colonised by the values of a social world organised around accumulation that he can no longer perceive the natural limit that genuine desire carries within it.
The billionaire who continues, past any conceivable personal need, to acquire — who measures his success in the distance between his fortune and the next one, who structures his days around the expansion of an already incomprehensible number, who experiences the plateau of sufficiency not as satisfaction but as stagnation — is, in the Epicurean account, not a person of extraordinary appetite. He is a person who has lost the capacity to feel satisfied, which is a specific and serious form of impoverishment. He has everything and he has nothing, because the nothing that the having was supposed to fill is still there, and the having has not touched it, and the having more will not touch it either, because the nothing is not the kind of thing that having fills.
Aristotle and the Unnatural Art of Wanting More
Aristotle made a distinction in the Politics that has not received the philosophical attention it deserves — a distinction between two fundamentally different relationships to material goods that he considered the difference between the natural and the pathological in economic life.
Oikonomia — the word from which we derive “economy” — was, for Aristotle, the natural art of household management: the acquisition and use of goods in the service of the genuinely good life, organised around the genuine needs of the household and the community, limited by those needs, completed when those needs were met. The farmer who produces enough to feed her family and her community, the craftsman who makes what his neighbours need and exchanges the surplus for what he needs in return — these are practitioners of oikonomia, and their economic activity is a natural expression of the social nature that Aristotle considered constitutive of the human being.
Chrematistics — the word that Aristotle coined for the other thing, the unnatural thing — was the art of wealth acquisition as an end in itself: the accumulation of money not as a means to the genuine goods that money can provide but as the goal, the measure, the thing that the activity of accumulation is for. The chrematist does not accumulate in order to live well. He accumulates in order to accumulate. The accumulation is its own justification, and there is no point at which the justification is satisfied, because the accumulation that justifies itself by reference to itself has no external limit — no point at which the genuine goods it was supposed to serve have been adequately provided and the activity can stop.
Aristotle was writing about a relatively simple economy, and the chrematistics he had in mind was primarily the practice of usury — the lending of money at interest, the making of money from money rather than from the production of genuine goods — which he considered the most unnatural form of acquisition because it was most completely detached from the genuine goods that acquisition was supposed to serve. But the analysis he develops to explain why chrematistics is unnatural and ethically problematic is an analysis that applies, with increasing force, to the economic arrangements of the contemporary world.
The hedge fund manager who manages other people’s money for percentage points of return, who has no relationship to the underlying goods that the financial instruments represent, who measures success in the ratio of his fund’s performance to his competitors’ — he is the chrematist, operating at a scale and with a sophistication that Aristotle could not have imagined and in terms that his analysis precisely describes. The accumulation has become completely detached from the genuine goods that the economy was supposed to produce access to. It is accumulation that justifies itself by reference to itself, that has no natural limit, that is the activity and the end simultaneously, and that cannot stop because stopping would require a reference point outside itself — a genuine good that had been sufficiently achieved — and no such reference point is available to an activity that has made itself its own end.
Socrates and the Poverty That Is Not Poverty
Socrates was poor. Not poor in the sense of the contemporary middle class that describes itself as poor while possessing more material goods than any previous generation in human history — genuinely poor, by the standards of his city and his time: lacking property, lacking savings, lacking the conventional markers of Athenian civic respectability. He went barefoot. He wore the same rough cloak in summer and winter. He ate simply, drank modestly by the standards of the symposia he attended, and spent his days in the agora engaging in philosophical conversation rather than in the marketplace acquiring the material basis for a more comfortable life.
This was not an accident of birth or a consequence of misfortune. It was a philosophical position — a considered and repeatedly defended choice to live in a way that the conventional values of his society considered inadequate and that his own philosophical analysis had revealed to be sufficient. The Apology makes the choice explicit: he has neglected his household and his finances because he has been occupied with the care of the soul, his own and those of his fellow citizens, and he considers this the right ordering of priorities — not because material goods are contemptible but because the care of the soul is the primary activity of the human life and the pursuit of material goods has a consistent tendency to displace it.
What Socrates understood — and what the person who has confused the accumulation of goods with the achievement of the good life has failed to understand — is that the conventional markers of success are not wrong because they are material but because they are external: because they place the standard of the good life in something that is not up to the person who is living it, that can be lost or taken or never achieved despite genuine effort, that therefore generates the specific anxiety of the person whose happiness depends on the outcome of processes he does not control.
The examined life — the life organised around the genuine question of what the good life consists of — is not a life of deprivation. It is a life of clarification: the progressive removal of the false goods that accumulation has substituted for the genuine ones, the progressive recognition that the life of genuine philosophical attention, of genuine friendship, of genuine care of the soul, requires less than the conventional life claims and provides more than the conventional life delivers.
The Socratic poverty is not poverty in any meaningful sense. It is the condition of the person who has reduced their wants to what is genuinely sufficient and has found in the reduction not scarcity but freedom — the specific freedom of the person whose happiness does not depend on what they do not have and cannot lose what they genuinely possess. By contrast, the person surrounded by the accumulated evidence of a life of chrematistics — the person in the house full of things, paying for the storage unit that holds the overflow, refreshing the portfolio screen, comparing himself to the person with more — is in a condition of genuine poverty: the poverty of the person who has never found out what enough is, and therefore has never had enough, and therefore cannot be said, in any philosophically serious sense, to have the thing he has been spending his life acquiring.
The Stoics and the Loan That Must Be Returned
Seneca wrote about wealth from the inside of it, and the specific authority that the inside perspective provides — the authority of the person who has tested the proposition rather than merely theorised it — gives the Letters their particular usefulness on this question.
He was, by any standard, extraordinarily wealthy. His fortune — acquired through a combination of inheritance, financial acumen, and the various advantages that proximity to imperial power provided — was one of the largest in Rome. He lived in considerable comfort. He owned multiple properties. He was, by the standards of the world he inhabited, a man of substantial material achievement.
And he wrote, from within this achievement, with a clarity about its relationship to genuine happiness that the person who has not achieved it cannot quite produce: “It is not the man who has too little who is poor, but the man who hankers after more.” The sentence is Epicurean in its content and Stoic in its framing, and the combination is precisely the point. Seneca does not pretend that his wealth is unpleasant or that poverty is preferable. He acknowledges the wealth as what the Stoics called a preferred indifferent — genuinely preferable to poverty, worth having if available, not worth pursuing at the cost of the internal goods that genuine happiness requires.
What he insists on — and what his philosophical practice was designed to cultivate — is the specific quality of relationship to external goods that the Stoic tradition called holding things lightly: the recognition that everything one possesses is held on loan, that fortune can recall it without notice, that the person whose happiness depends on the continuation of the loan is the person who has placed their most important possession — their equanimity, their rational self-organisation, their capacity for genuine pleasure — in the hands of a creditor who may call the debt in at any moment.
The negative visualisation that Marcus Aurelius practised — the regular, deliberate imagination of the loss of the things one currently possesses — was not morbidity and was not the cultivation of anxiety. It was the practice of the right relationship to preferred indifferents: the regular reminder that the things are loans, that the person who genuinely knows this can enjoy the loan without the desperate clinging that the assumption of permanent ownership generates, and that the enjoyment available to the person who holds things lightly is greater, more stable, and more genuinely pleasurable than the enjoyment available to the person who clutches them.
The person who cannot stop accumulating is, in this framework, a person who has not learned to hold things lightly — who has not made the Stoic distinction between the possession and the possessor, who has so thoroughly identified himself with what he owns that the prospect of sufficiency feels like the prospect of extinction. He accumulates not because the accumulation serves any genuine need but because the accumulation is, at this point, all he has in the place where a self should be. To stop accumulating would be to face the emptiness that the accumulating has been covering. And the emptiness is the thing he cannot face.
Kierkegaard and the Aesthetic Stage: The Modern Name for the Ancient Disease
Kierkegaard did not write about wealth specifically, and the aesthetic stage he described in Either/Or is not primarily an economic category. But it is the most precise modern description of the psychological structure that Epicurus identified in ancient terms, and the bridge it provides between the Greek diagnosis and the contemporary condition is exact enough to be essential.
The aesthetic individual — the person at the first and lowest stage of Kierkegaard’s account of the self — organises her life around the pursuit of interesting experience, of stimulation, of the moment. She is clever, cultured, attuned to pleasure in its various forms. She is also, at the core of herself, empty — not in the sense of lacking intelligence or feeling but in the specific philosophical sense of lacking the continuity of self that genuine commitment produces. She has not chosen herself. She has not made the decisive act of self-constitution that Kierkegaard considers the founding act of genuine selfhood. She is the accumulation of her experiences and her pleasures and her distractions rather than a self that has these things and is more than them.
The aesthetic individual accumulates experience in the same way that the chrematist accumulates wealth: not because the accumulation serves a genuine end but because the accumulation has become the activity, and the activity has become the substitute for the self that a genuine life would produce. The boredom that the aesthetic individual is always running from — the specific, pervasive, motiveless boredom that descends between stimulations — is the feeling of the emptiness that the stimulations cover and that the next stimulation will cover again, temporarily, before the boredom returns.
Contemporary consumer culture is the institutional form of the aesthetic stage — the economic and cultural apparatus designed to produce the aesthetic individual at scale and to service the specific pattern of desire that the aesthetic individual generates. It is designed to produce the experience of temporary satisfaction followed by renewed desire: the cycle of the stimulation that satisfies just enough to prevent genuine dissatisfaction from building to the point of productive crisis, and not enough to produce the genuine satisfaction that might end the cycle. It is designed to fill the space where the self should be with products, and to ensure that the filling is always incomplete, so that the next product can fill what the previous one failed to.
The person who cannot stop shopping — who buys what she does not need with money she does not have to impress people she does not particularly like, who fills her storage unit with the physical record of her own dissatisfaction, who lies awake at night aware that something is missing and reaches for her phone to scroll through images of things she might acquire — is not a person of large appetite. She is a person of no self. The accumulation is the response to the absence. The more she accumulates, the more precisely the accumulation demonstrates that what is absent is not acquirable.
The Billionaire and the Spiritual Poverty of Unlimited Want
It is necessary to be honest about the billionaire — not in the sense of providing a balanced account that acknowledges both the failures and the achievements, but in the specific philosophical sense of applying the analysis with the rigour it deserves and following it where it leads.
The person who has accumulated a billion dollars — who has, by any measure, more wealth than any individual could spend in ten lifetimes — and who continues to accumulate, who measures his success in the distance between his fortune and the next one, who structures his days around the expansion of a number so large it has ceased to bear any meaningful relationship to the genuine goods that money can provide access to — this person is not, in the Greek framework, enviable. He is, in the precise philosophical sense, a figure of tragedy: a person of extraordinary capability who has applied his capabilities in the service of a confusion so fundamental that the extraordinary scale of the achievement is the measure of the extraordinary scale of the error.
The error is not merely practical — not merely the misallocation of resources that might have been used for genuine human goods. It is philosophical: the confusion of the instrument with the end, the means with the good, the number with the life that numbers are supposed to make possible. The billionaire who continues to accumulate has answered the question “what do I want this for?” with the answer “to have more of it,” which is not an answer but the refusal of an answer — the insistence that the wanting requires no justification beyond itself, that the accumulation is its own end, that the limit the Epicurean framework insists is there is simply absent.
This refusal of the limit is not merely a moral failure in the sense of a failure of generosity or a failure of social responsibility, though it is both of those things. It is a failure of self-knowledge — the failure of the person who has not examined the structure of his own desire, who has not made the Epicurean distinction between the desire that has a natural limit and the desire that does not, who has therefore spent his considerable capabilities in the service of a wanting that could not, in principle, be satisfied and that has not, in practice, been satisfied, and that has produced a life of extraordinary external achievement and — by the evidence of the continued accumulation, which is itself the evidence that the satisfaction has not arrived — an internal condition that the achievement has not touched.
There is compassion available here, and the compassion is not sentimental. The person who cannot stop accumulating is suffering. The suffering is not the suffering of deprivation — it is the suffering of the person who has never found out what the thing he is seeking actually is, and who has therefore been seeking it in the wrong place, and who has been finding it insufficient, and who has therefore sought more of it, and who has been finding that insufficient too, in the specific cycle of the vain and empty desire that Epicurus described with such uncomfortable precision two and a half thousand years ago.
The suffering does not excuse the injustice. A world in which one person holds the resources of a small nation while other people cannot feed their children is a world of injustice, and the philosophical analysis of the billionaire’s spiritual poverty does not diminish the injustice or exempt the billionaire from the moral obligation that Aristotle and the Stoics and Socrates all identified: the obligation of the person who has more than he needs to the community that made the having possible. The compassionate reading and the moral reading are not alternatives. They are the same reading applied to different dimensions of the same condition.
Pleonexia as Political Pathology
The Greeks had a political concept for the condition that this essay has been describing as both a personal failure and a philosophical one. Pleonexia — literally the having of more, the wanting of more than one’s fair share — was considered by Plato and Aristotle not merely a personal vice but a political pathology: the condition that, when it operated at sufficient scale and with sufficient impunity, destroyed the social fabric that made the good life possible for anyone.
Plato’s diagnosis in the Republic — that the city organised around the pursuit of wealth rather than the pursuit of the good would inevitably become a city of factions, of the haves and the have-nots, of the oligarchic class and the democratic class and the eventual tyranny that the conflict between them would produce — reads, in the contemporary moment, less like political theory and more like a description of something currently happening. The specific mechanism he identifies: the democratic city that allows the accumulation of wealth without limit, that celebrates the accumulation as the measure of human worth, that gradually loses the shared understanding of the common good that political life requires — this is the city that is currently being built, in various versions, across the democratic world.
Aristotle’s account of justice as the condition in which each member of the community receives what is genuinely their due — not what they can extract by virtue of their power, not what the market assigns by virtue of the ability to command it, but what is genuinely proportionate to their contribution to and their need within the community — is a standard that the current distribution of wealth does not meet, by any measure that takes the standard seriously.
The Stoic account of cosmopolitan obligation — the obligation to the rational community of all human beings that transcends and overrides the obligations of particular political membership — is, in the context of global inequality, perhaps the most demanding political philosophy available: the proposition that the person who has more than he needs is, by that fact, in a relationship of obligation to the person who does not have enough, and that the relationship is not charitable but moral — not the voluntary generosity of the fortunate but the required recognition of the rational community member for the claims of the fellow community member.
None of these frameworks requires a specific political programme. They require a specific quality of honesty — the honesty of the person who has genuinely examined the question of what enough is, who has applied the Epicurean analysis to their own desires and found, in that application, the distinction between the natural and the vain, and who has drawn from that finding the political conclusions that the finding logically entails: that a community organised around the unlimited satisfaction of vain and empty desires is not a community organised around the genuine good of its members, and that the philosophical life — the examined life, the life that has found out what enough is — is not a private achievement but a political one.
The Storage Unit and the Soul
Return, finally, to the storage unit — to the forty billion dollars a year, the one household in ten, the overflow of accumulation that has exceeded even the expanded capacity of the expanded home to contain it.
The storage unit is not a symbol of greed. It is something more ordinary and more philosophically interesting than greed: it is the physical record of the person who has not yet asked the question that Epicurus considered the first question of the philosophical life. Not what do I want — they know what they want, or think they do. Not how do I get more of it — they know how to do that too. But: what is this for? What genuine good does this serve? What natural need does this satisfy, and when will the satisfaction be complete?
The stuff in the storage unit is the answer that convention has provided to questions that the person who is paying for the storage has not quite asked. The answer is: more. More is the answer, and the answer has a specific physical form — the boxes and the furniture and the clothes and the equipment — and the specific physical form has a specific physical location, which is a climate-controlled unit in an industrial park on the edge of a city, and the specific physical location has a specific monthly cost, and the cost is paid without much thought, because the stuff in the unit is not really the point anymore and has not been the point for some time.
What has happened, in the unit and in the life that generated it, is the specific thing that Kierkegaard described as the failure of the aesthetic stage and that Epicurus described as the domination of the vain and empty desire: the gradual colonisation of the self by the activity of accumulation, until the accumulation has become the self and the self has become the accumulation, and the question of what the accumulation is for has become unanswerable not because it is difficult but because there is no longer a self present, separate from the accumulation, to answer it.
The examined life — the life that Socrates died for the right to live, that Epicurus built a garden to demonstrate, that Marcus Aurelius reminded himself of in a tent on the Danube frontier — is the life that has asked and answered this question. Not once, definitively, and moved on. But continuously, as the question requires: what is enough? What is this for? What genuine good does this serve? Is this desire natural and limited, or is it vain and empty and without end?
The answers are not complicated. Bread, water, shelter, friendship, the company of people who are genuinely known and genuinely cared for, the specific pleasures of the examined mind engaging honestly with the world — these are the goods that the natural desires point toward, and they are available, reliably and without great difficulty, to anyone who has understood what they are and what they are for.
The storage unit can be emptied. The wanting that filled it cannot be emptied by accumulation. It can only be addressed by the question that the accumulation was designed to avoid — the question that the philosophical tradition from Socrates to Epictetus considered the most important question available to a conscious being in a mortal life.
What is enough?
The answer, when you find it, is always smaller than you feared and larger than you hoped. It fits in a garden. It fits in a small house in Nicopolis with the sea coming through the open door. It fits in a tent on a frontier, by lamplight, in the hand of a man who is writing down what he already knows.
It has always been enough. The problem is that we have spent so long being told otherwise that we have forgotten how to feel it.
The primary sources for this essay are Epicurus’s Principal Doctrines and Letter to Menoeceus, in The Epicurus Reader translated by Brad Inwood and L.P. Gerson (Hackett); Aristotle’s Politics, translated by C.D.C. Reeve (Hackett), particularly Books I and II on chrematistics and natural acquisition; Seneca’s Letters from a Stoic and On the Shortness of Life, translated by Robin Campbell and C.D.N. Costa respectively (Penguin Classics); Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, translated by Gregory Hays (Modern Library); and Kierkegaard’s Either/Or, translated by Howard and Edna Hong (Princeton University Press). For the contemporary economic context, Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics (Chelsea Green) provides the most useful framework for thinking about sufficiency in economic terms. Thorstein Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), available in multiple editions, is the founding text of the sociological analysis of accumulation as status performance.
My World of Interiors 