Will there ever be a limit to what we humans perceive as enough? Can ‘enough’ become what used to be known as ‘virtue ‘- specifically used here as that which is meant to be good and to serve as a sort of moral compass. It can be reasonably suggested that such a compass is currently lacking given ongoing realities around us.

Consider the following:  when last did you hear, use, read, write or think about the word ‘enough’ or that ‘enough is enough’. Perhaps Ai can help us to figure out its use or deployment over the last five years! You the reader may wish to explore that. Perhaps with the constant news of wars, the impunity of some nation states bent on invading/annexing/killing, or the rounding up of prople for deportation, or the revenge and brutal stabbing/shooting of another young person or the constant revelations of past sins and evil of former icons, we may finally find ourselves screaming at our TV (or whatever our media point) or joinng protests to witness to “enough”. It’s all too much to bear.

It would not be unreasonable to wager, though, that there are a few places or spaces where the deploying of ‘enough’ would find one hell of a time to surface. Consider parliamentary debates in Britain (or your own country) over the last five years – would you find any evidence there? Perhaps, using our magnifying glasses to pore over the manifestos of political parties for some clue that politicians are thinking ‘enough is enough’ (to borrow an expression/thesis from the late Bob Goudzwaard largely to argue for an ‘economics of enough’) may bear some fruit. Certainly, any common-sense notion or giving space for a habit of ‘enough’ would rarely be evident in Wealth and Asset Managers vocabulary or for that matter at any shareholder meeting of our water providers (as an example) or across the corporate world.

And, what about the enormous collection of Church Synods and Assemblies reports and resolutions: would the notion of ‘enough’ feature in or on the landscape of any of these? We would wish and hope that such may be the case, yet one would search in vain for any robust consideration on a ‘theology of enough’. The late Desmond Tutu once ruminated: “When will we learn, when will the people of the world get up and say, enough is enough. God created us for fellowship. God created us so that we should form the human family, existing together because we were made for one another. We are not made for exclusive self-sufficiency but for interdependence, and we break the law of our being at our peril.”

Hope, though, or shoots of it do spring from unlikely corners and flourish but not without a cost. For sure, there is one group or space where “enough” is the orienting drive. For a long time, climate activists have been screaming, and like that prophet of long time ago (Ezekiel) have been chaining themselves from pillars to gates to roadways, making their case that ‘enough means enough’. No wonder the authorities (yes out of fear) continue to find all necessary means to outlaw their protesting practices. This, one exception (among some others) along with the ongoing multiple display of insatiable greed and impunity all around, has led me to reasonable deduce that the word ‘enough’ and the shaping of a necessary habit around it (as a virtue) urgently needs to (a)rise again. Laozi was correct in observing that the one or the nation or the people “who knows enough is enough will always have enough”. Therein lies a clue as to why the need for this necessary and urgent counter-habit.

@caribleaper (January 5, 2026)