Do you know that around $389 billion dollars will be spent on advertising this year? These dollars will be spent to tell us exactly what we need to improve our lives. They will be spent to tell us what we need to change, how to change it, improve it, or fix it. These dollars will tell us how to find happiness and how to find ease. They will tell us what we are missing. They will provide the answer. They will make us a promise…and all we have to do is buy the product.
I know these voices are luring and their promise enticing. I know how easily I can be swayed into compliance, entertaining yet another item of clutter and disappointment. I also know that some of these items do bring ease and improvement to my life.
But frankly, I don’t want to be sidetracked or to be taken away from myself. I don’t want the outside voices of advertisers to drown out the wisdom of my own inner voice. I don’t want to spend another year captive to feeling incomplete and needing the next thing.
And so my intentions are different this year. Instead of the multiple goals I set for myself every January, I’m setting my intentions on feeling enoughness. Because when I wrap myself in the feeling of enoughness, I experience satisfaction, contentment, ease, gratitude, compassion, and generosity. I like this feeling.
So who gets me this year? Not the advertisers, not the fix-myself resolutions, not the believing that I need one more thing to be complete or to be happy or to make life easier.
As 2025 brings with it a world challenged by climate change, a challenge brought on by over-consumption, wrapping myself in enoughness feels like a check on my own excess.
As 2025 brings with it a world steeped in grave inequality, where a few are drowning in excess, and the many are suffering in lack, wrapping myself in enoughness feels like a political stance.
Living in the feeling of satisfaction, contentment, ease, gratitude, compassion, and generosity feels like the place where my human heart wants to be. And it feels like the place from which I want to engage in all my relations with family, strangers, and the non -human world. It feels like the place from which I want to meet the challenges currently begging to be addressed.
What about the almost constant advertisements telling me what I need? Well, I think wrapping myself in enoughness is a good place to discern my inner wisdom instead of the luring promises. It feels like a place I can trust myself to make decisions about what I need and what is excess.