Enough Is Enough

King Solomon of Israel amassed a fortune during his reign. Through tribute money from dependent kingdoms, Solomon collected 666 talents (about twenty-five tons) of gold each year. If gold is $1,000 per ounce, that’s $800 million every year! And that didn’t include his income from taxation and commerce. (See 1 Kings 10:14-29.)

You might say Solomon was a maximalist. Instead of seeing how he felt about living with less, he tried to find out what it was like living with more. He said to himself, “Come now, I will test you with pleasure to find out what is good” (Ecclesiastes 2:1, NIV).

He built houses and planted vineyards. He owned more livestock than anyone else in Jerusalem. He had gold and silver, male and female singers, and a harem. As he wrote, “I became greater by far than anyone in Jerusalem before me.… I denied myself nothing my eyes desired” (Ecclesiastes 2:9-10, NIV).

Yet at the end of his life Solomon wrote these words: “When I surveyed all that my hands had done and what I had toiled to achieve, everything was meaningless, a chasing after the wind” (Ecclesiastes 2:11, NIV).

Futility. That’s what Solomon found. 

Solomon experimented with seeing if possessions and money would bring happiness. His experiment failed. What if we tried a different experiment? What if we tried to live with only what we need for the true purposes of our lives?

The best way to tell the difference between a need and a want is to try doing without something for a while. If you’re not sure whether you want to get rid of something completely, put it in the garage or a closet for a month. If you don’t miss it, you don’t need it.

Society promotes Solomon’s kind of experimentation: spend as much on yourself as you can. And like Israel’s richest king, many people are headed toward a sense of disillusionment and futility. 

Let’s take heed, why don’t we? Let us go the other way and experiment in living with less. As we find out how much we really need to live and then stick there, we’ll make room in our lives for all the satisfaction and fulfillment that wealthy Solomon was hoping for but failed to find. 

What is one possession you could experiment with doing without for the next month?