Here is a question that catches most people out, and I include myself among them for a long stretch of my career. How much is enough? Not as a philosophical prompt, but as a number in your bank account, a title, a specific state of affairs you could recognise if you arrived at it. Most of us have never actually answered it. We don’t have a definition of the destination, and the consequence is that the target moves every time you approach it. Your “number” goes up when you get close to it.

This is not a moral failing and it is not really about greed. It shows up as the years spent in a condition of permanent insufficiency, in which you feel you are behind, slightly short, a little way from the point at which things would be alright. That is a strange way to spend a life, particularly for people who by any external measure are doing extremely well. In the FIRE (Financial Independence Retire Early) community, it is known as the “one more year” syndrome.

The remedy is a decision, made deliberately and in advance, about what enough looks like. Write it down: this much money, this kind of work, this shape of a week. Then, when you reached it make a conscious decision about the next step. You may still choose to keep going, and there is nothing wrong with that; the difference is that you will be doing it as a choice rather than as a reflex. Enough is a decision you make, and then defend. So, as a reflection for today: could you say, right now and in specific terms, what enough would look like? And if not, how would you ever know you had it?