I built a career around corporate budgets measured in billions, and I could tell you the payback period of nearly any investment you put in front of me. Yet I reached my fifties without ever once running the only calculation that actually governed my life: how much money was enough?
I do not mean vaguely wondering, which everyone does in the car sometimes. I mean sitting down with real numbers and finding out.
The omission was not laziness. Looking back, I believe it was protective, because the chase I was on required the number to stay unknown. More does not need a spreadsheet. More is self-justifying: the next bonus, the next title, the next bracket, each one obviously necessary because no one has defined the point at which it would not be. A specific number, though, is dangerous to a person like I was, because a specific number can be reached. And then what? The question I was avoiding was never really financial.
The Aha Moment
The night my wife and I finally ran the numbers, I expected the math to confirm what I had always assumed: that the life we had built required the income I was earning, and that I was, in the noblest possible sense, trapped. Line by line, the spreadsheet disagreed. We needed significantly less than I was making to live a life that felt genuinely comfortable to us. Not a monastic life. We would trade down the cars (goodbye, BMW), buy fewer things, eat out less, and put to rest the fantasy of a second home in the mountains. What remained was still comfortable by any sane measure, still aspirational for most of the world. The trap, it turned out, had been unlocked the whole time. The door was never locked, and the years inside had been a choice.
Yet, a more uncomfortable discovery was hiding inside the line items. As we worked through them, I kept having to ask what each expense was actually for, and an embarrassing share of my answers reduced to the same thing: signaling. The cars, some of the clothes, the wine, a surprising amount of spending I had filed under taste, existed primarily for an audience. We were paying for the lifestyle that came with my position rather than choosing the life we actually intentionally defined ourselves.
Defining Your True Self
So, the first question, which I now ask accomplished people and which almost none can answer: have you actually run your number? Not estimated it, not gestured at it, but computed it, with your real expenses and your real preferences, distinguishing what you would keep if it were invisible from what exists to be seen. Precision matters here, because vagueness is the enabler. As long as enough remains undefined, more remains unarguable.
The second question sits underneath the spreadsheet: how much of what you spend is satisfaction, and how much is signaling? A rough test that reorganized me: which of your purchases would survive if no one could ever see them? For us, the long dinners with friends passed the test easily. The BMW did not. Some other luxuries pass the test honestly, and they are worth every dollar. The rest are rent paid on an identity, and the strange thing about that rent is that it rises with every promotion, which is how the trap rebuilds itself one raise at a time and why some of the richest people I know often feel the least free.
And third, the question the other two are protecting you from: what might you decide if you knew the number? For me, the answer arrived within months of that night at the table. I told my wife I thought I needed to leave the company where I had spent over a decade at that point. She said she knew, and that I had been miserable long enough. The number had not made the decision for me. It had done something more valuable: it removed the alibi. I could no longer tell myself that I had no choice.
I am not selling downsizing, and this is not a sermon about deprivation. We remain comfortable, and I remain glad of it. The point of enough was never austerity. It is authorship: knowing whether the life you are funding is one you chose or one that chose you, arriving one automatic upgrade at a time. I have no formula for where your number sits. I can only report what I found when I finally looked. My number turned out to be smaller than my fear of calculating it. Yours may too.
Author Bio
Sonny Garg is the author of Desi 2.0: My Family’s American Dream and the Cost of Never Being Enough, (Amplify Publishing, August 4, 2026) , a memoir exploring achievement addiction, immigrant identity, and the search for meaning beyond success. A graduate of the University of Chicago and Harvard, Garg was a White House Fellow and rose to executive leadership in a Fortune 125 company.
Yet despite achieving many of the milestones he had spent his life pursuing, he found himself asking a difficult question: why didn’t success make him feel successful?
Through his writing and speaking, Garg explores how inherited expectations shape our identities and how we can create lives defined not only by achievement, but by connection and belonging. Learn more at Sonny Garg.