"Enough"

In May 2005, The New Yorker published a poem Kurt Vonnegut wrote about Joseph Heller, author of Catch-22:

True story, Word of Honor:
Joseph Heller, an important and funny writer
now dead,
and I were at a party given by a billionaire
on Shelter Island.
I said, “Joe, how does it make you feel
to know that our host only yesterday
may have made more money
than your novel ‘Catch-22’
has earned in its entire history?”
And Joe said, “I’ve got something he can never have.”
And I said, “What on earth could that be, Joe?”
And Joe said, “The knowledge that I’ve got enough.”
Not bad! Rest in peace!

Some huge names appeared at a comedy festival in September—Pete Davidson, Louis CK, Dave Chappelle, and Bill Burr (among others). It was an incredible lineup and anyone would have been lucky to go. But tickets were hard to come by: it was hosted by Saudi Arabia's General Entertainment Authority in the capital city of Riyadh.

The same General Entertainment Authority is organizing a flag football tournament, the "Fanatics Flag Football Classic," in March 2026. The tournament will feature Tom Brady coming out of retirement, with other past and present NFL stars like Saquon Barkley, Myles Garrett, Odell Beckham Jr., and Rob Gronkowski.

Pete Davidson's (net worth: $4 million) dad was a firefighter in New York and died on 9/11, an attack funded and supported by Saudi Arabia. Louis CK (net worth: $35 million), no stranger to controversy, made a career out of calling out hypocrisy. Much of Dave Chappelle's (net worth: $70 million) comedy revolves around the mistreatment, past and present, of people of color.

Gisele Bundchen, a Brazilian freakin' supermodel, dumped Tom Brady (net worth: $530 million) because he couldn't commit to retire from football to spend time with his family. Saquon Barkley (net worth: $30 million), Myles Garrett ($60 million, not counting a recent $160 million contract extension), OBJ ($45 million), and Gronk ($45 million) probably don't look to buy store brand peanut butter.

And all these guys accepted money from Saudi Arabia, a kingdom known for such niceties as torturing prisoners, arresting activists, hunting down and murdering enemies abroad (see: Jamal Khashoggi), executing those in the LBGTQ community, and requiring women to have a male legal guardian with no say in who the guardian is (despite this, some female comedians performed at the festival).

But if you're Pete Davidson, you can look past all that. He said, "I just, you know, I get the flight routing and then I see the number and I go, ‘I’ll go.’"

Comedian Marc Maron summed it up: "The same guy that’s gonna pay them is the same guy that paid that guy to bone-saw Jamal Khashoggi and put him in a f---ing suitcase. But don’t let that stop the yuks, it’s gonna be a good time!"

But it's not just high profile comedians and athletes taking egregious sums of petrodollars that struggle to understand enough-ness. I'm fortunate to live in a nice neighborhood. Nice houses, luxury cars, golf carts, vacation homes, and high-end country club memberships are common. And people rarely seem to have enough—the law firm partner yelling into his phone at 6am while driving by in his $80k Mercedes. The two-doctor family sending their kids to daycare after a full school day. The porches full of daily deliveries from Amazon, Vuori, and LuLu trying to fill some kind of void.

When I first read about the Riyadh Comedy Festival, my first reaction was to judge. When I see neighbors speeding away after school drop-off or sending kids to after-school care, my instinct is to shake my head. But that's not it—because I totally get it. We (not you and me, but the collective We) have decided that "number go up" is the path to happiness. Our first question when we meet someone is, "So, what do you do for work?" We're impressed when someone gets a new car or builds an addition on their house. We envy the Hawaiian vacation.

We want to be great parents or spouses. We want to get to the gym more and eat better. We want to work on being more patient, read more books, or be less addicted to our screens. But those are all hard to quantify, embarrassing to talk about, or require vulnerability. What's the easier yardstick? The cost of a vacation or new car, square footage of an addition, and our salary.

And the appearance fee for a Saudi comedy festival or flag football tournament.

There's nothing wrong with being a billionaire or having a house on Shelter Island. There's nothing wrong with a million-dollar appearance fee or the next promotion, the next parlay on DraftKings, or the next Vuori delivery. They just won't bring us any lasting contentment.

What will? "The knowledge that I've got enough."