Self-reflection: Have I Had Enough?

Stephenson Westernlund
3 min readMay 7, 2024

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This year, I’ve been moving to one of the most prestigious apartments in Jakarta after living several months in a wealthy area in Singapore, moving to a more stable job, and constantly building myself. I’ve been busy traveling, working out, working as a corporate professional, reading more than ever, and exploring my hobbies on a more intimate level. This is the life that I have dreamed about for a very long time. But there’s a question that still remained that needs to be answered, “Have I Had Enough?”

So I try to discover what it means to have enough. After all, who decides enough in order to achieve personal happiness? Years ago, when I landed my first job at DHL, I thought that it might be enough for me if I made a salary the same as the senior role or decision maker management role. Just to find out in the past two years when that number is achievable, it unlocks another standard and comparison from others privileged group of people that you’ve never thought up before. I ended up wanting more.

Keep thinking about how comparison is a thief of joy. I try to define what is enough by being uniquely me. After all, I can not have everything in order to achieve a fulfilling life. There’s no reason for me to not feel enough when I’m in the phase where the problems that I have are categorized as first world problems. Here’s what I learned about achieving an “enough life”:

Mapping out one’s goals in a given timeframe, gives us a chance to understand what it means to be “enough”.

One thing that I notice about the reason for my confusion about defining enough is that in the past few years, especially in order to outlook how I aim at my life is how clueless and unplanned I am about setting my expectations periodically about what goals that I need to achieve in a given timeframe. I remember back in high school when life was simpler, I set a goal that being the top 3 in class would be my target academically. when I’ve finally got the place to be in that number, I feel more satisfied and get the feel that I am enough academically. The problems start when I get out of my academic world and enter real adult life. I never really set goals in a given timeframe anymore. I take my fitness goals for example. I don’t track any progress about it. I just do it because I simply enjoy doing it, and yet it ends like I never felt satisfied with my body. It also applied to my career, financial status, and social upbringing. The idea is, by setting and tracking one goal in a given timeframe, we set a goal and road to achieve that “enough” in our own unique term and because of that we will be more conscious of being satisfied.

But when we already succeed in mapping our goals and mapping our expectations to get enough, we will face major problems as a part of a big complex social construct, called social expectation. To what degree should we compare our standard to others? Does our measurement of enough catch up with a good standard that is going on in our current socio-economic circle? We are bombarded with a constant need to prove who owned the biggest home, fanciest car, more prestigious credit card, the need to have dinner in the fanciest restaurant in the city. We are fighting to flex a better life in order to be accepted that we have enough or even better more than enough, and yet we are fighting to prove the point to people that might have a little to no idea what it means to be “enough”. I think that happiness is achievable if we spent more time to be connected to ourselves by our own standard and less time looking at others and onward. After all, for me, enough and feeling happy about it has a lot to do with things I know I can control. To control to not give enough unproductive responses to social expectation is one of them.

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