And plenty makes us poor. — John Donne

And plenty makes us poor.

Author: John Donne

Insight: We live in an age of abundance that somehow feels suffocating. You have access to more music than could ever be listened to, more books than could be read in ten lifetimes, more food choices at a single grocery store than existed in most of human history. Yet many of us feel oddly depleted, as if having everything available has made us unable to truly enjoy anything. This is what Donne meant—plenty, paradoxically, impoverishes us. The problem isn't that abundance is bad. It's that scarcity creates focus. When you had three shirts, you knew those shirts intimately. When you could eat only what was in season, that food meant something. Now we scroll through endless options and feel simultaneously overstimulated and unsatisfied. We're poor not in resources but in attention, intention, and appreciation. We bounce between choices so quickly that nothing settles into us deeply enough to nourish us. The counterintuitive answer isn't to give up modern plenty, but to artificially create scarcity for ourselves. Choose a book and stick with it. Eat one thing slowly instead of sampling ten. Limit your wardrobe deliberately. By constraining our options, we return to that richer state where what we have actually matters to us again.