My Nepali Brother Taught Me The Meaning of “Enough”
How it finally sunk in that advertisers are liars
In January of 2020, I set off for the Peace Corps in Nepal. During my Peace Corps training (that was rudely interrupted by COVID-19) I lived on the edge of Kathmandu in the house of a man named Salikram Banjara.
Over and over again, I experienced the “these people don’t need your help” check-your-privilege moment. This commonly happens when people in this opulent dystopia of surplus that we call home occasionally leave to “help” those “less fortunate.”
Sorry about the air quotes, on to the point!
So often, when we travel from our society to a community like the one I was living in, we are simply amazed that people can get by without hyper-consumerist gadgets that are designed to save negligible amounts of time.
We run back to our comfortable first-world homes after these experiences, blown away that the people we met could be “so happy” in the absence of microwaves, avocado pitters, or whatever silly one-purpose gadgets we pick up at our myriad of strip mall stores (so named because they strip you of money in exchange for clutter).
I’m against clutter. The photo on the left gives me anxiety.
During my Peace Corps training in Nepal, I was able to decondition my drive to consume a bit, through simple tasks like doing laundry by hand and making tea on a camp stove in the “kitchen” (The family I was staying with had run out of money to finish the top floor of their house, so the kitchen was four brick walls with sheet metal laid over the top).
One day, however, I was gripped by a materialistic desire for a tailored jacket. I decided to buy myself one with some of my saved bartending money from back home. I’ve always loved the “whimsical, aging intellectual professor” look, so I went and got measured for a wool brown-checkered tweed sport coat with black leather elbow patches.
As someone from the rich world, I was getting a crazy deal ($78). My host brother even went with me as a native speaker, to make sure I wasn’t charged “too much”, which in this context would have meant a difference of about $10-$30.
We walked back home together after the measuring and consultation, feeling a bit awkward as we usually did with the language barrier. He knew more English than I knew Nepali, but even so, we were toddlers to each other (I remember a conversation we had about the rain, where I had to refer to it as “sky water” in Nepali).
We were having a conversation much like that when my host brother made it understood that he wanted to help pay for my coat. He told me that it was a lot of money and that he wanted to help. He said “you are my brother and friend. What you need I give.”
I froze. At the risk of repeating myself, this man didn’t have the money to finish the second floor of his house. He was offering to help with the cost of my jacket, which meant almost nothing to me, with my pre-Peace Corps bartending savings.
I told him that the Peace Corps was covering the cost, and went to bed, shaken. I’d been a guest in this man’s house for about four weeks. I’d found a tailor I liked and ordered a jacket because I wanted to.
I thought of it as a killer deal, like Nepal was a clearance rack full of tailored clothing, at a great price! My life wasn’t suffering or deficient because of the absence of a tailored tweed coat. I ordered one out of materialism. A man I’d known less than a month, from a place with radically less socioeconomic opportunity, was offering to pitch in on it.
I’m a white male who was raised in a lower-middle-class family in the most individualistic society on earth. Even having studied the desire to consume, I’m still deficient at shutting it down when it happens.
I had agreed to exchange some of my money for a jacket because I thought of it and wanted it. That’s how I was raised, in the land of consumption. I was raised that I was on my own when it came to saving for and buying nice things. I’ve never had anyone in my American family offer to help me with anything as frivolous and unnecessary as a tweed sport coat.
The truth was, the fact that my host brother hadn’t finished the kitchen of his house was no great stress to him. The houses in the valley I was staying in were all built piecemeal, mostly by the very people who would inhabit them, with the neighbors helping when they could.
Though it wasn’t insulated, the bottom floor of my host brother’s house was finished and cozy. The house would get done when the money came. Until then, nothing could be done.
I was shaken because I had never experienced anything like this, growing up in the rich world. Real contentment, not like we experience it in our high-consuming dystopia.
Once you have shelter and enough food, you have enough. Then you can look for love and belonging. The horrible thing about being conditioned to consume from a young age is that we never feel that we are experiencing abundance.
We don’t have the right shelter. We’re not eating the right foods. Our hedonistic minds tell us to get more, more, more. We never move past the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy, because we have news outlets telling us that we are not safe (but that that fear can be temporarily alleviated by an awesome security system).
Enough is a mindset. It is a perspective trick. If we believe that we can spend our way to enough with more money and bigger lifestyles, the finish line is always shifting. What is enough for you? Chances are, it’s a lot less than you think.
Sadly our hunt for stuff means we lose focus on what makes us truly happy, each other. We are brainwashed by our TV’s, phones, etc. Thank you for this.
Great read and very insightful. This line says it all: “ Once you have shelter and enough food, you have enough. Then you can look for love and belonging.” Thank you