The American anthropologist Marshall Sahlins defined affluence not as a satisfaction of wants. Essentially he argued that one can be satisfied by “producing much or desiring little”. By that measure, people who lived in small foraging groups — and who by every modern definition had almost nothing — were the “original affluent society”. The point was never that they had more than us. It was that they were not chasing anything they could not already reach.
Some two thousand years before Sahlins, Epictetus made a similar observation. The Greek philosopher, who had been born a slave and lectured for free to anyone who turned up, was once asked who the rich man is. His answer was: “He who is content.”
I think about this when I look around my own life.
I am drawn to minimalism — perhaps for this reason. The Sahlins frame and the Epictetus frame both say the same thing: the route to enough is not necessarily through more but through wanting less. I have wondered, on and off for years, whether my attraction to that idea is honest or whether I am just paying lip service to a lifestyle that flatters my self-image. The shape of my year has me splitting my time between Ireland and Southeast Asia, which means I have spent a chunk of the last decade living out of a couple of suitcases. In some ways, I have been forced, by simple logistics, to find out how little I actually need to live well. The answer turned out to be less than I would have assumed.
Things I assumed I needed and now know I don’t: a wardrobe with many options, a “good” coat for going out, a coffee machine, a printer, decorative anything, more than a dozen books at any one time, a car for most of the year, a kitchen with the implements to do anything more complicated than what I cook. I am not bragging about any of this; it is just what falls away when you move around with a single bag every few months. The interesting part is not that I survived without these things. It is that I stopped wanting them.
The modern direction — produce more, want more, work more to close the gap — leaves visible evidence. PwC’s 2026 real estate outlook reports that the share of U.S. households renting a self-storage unit rose from 11.1 percent in 2022 to 13.4 percent in 2024 — the largest two-year jump on record. More than one in eight American households now pays rent on extra space to hold the things they have bought.
Step back from that sentence for a moment. We have arrived at a point in the cycle where the natural next step after acquiring things is renting another building to hold the ones we do not have room for. I find that more striking than any anthropological figure. The self-storage industry is, in a quiet way, a monument to a particular relationship between wants and means.
I am wary of taking the wants-side credit for myself, though. It’s not that I deliberately decided to want less, though I do think about this when purchasing new things. The wants quietly receded as the shape of my life changed, mostly without me deciding they should. Sahlins, to his credit, predicted this — he treated the low wants of foragers as structural rather than virtuous, an outcome of how their lives were arranged rather than a moral achievement they had earned. The same is probably true of me. The minimalism is downstream of the rootlessness, not the other way around.
There is a version of this piece that ends with “and so, we should all want less.” I do not fully believe that, partly because telling other people what to want is famously ineffective and partly because the people who tell themselves they want less the loudest are often the ones who want the most. What I would settle for, more modestly, is the observation that we have been trained to take the modern direction — chase the want, close the gap by producing — as the only direction.
The times I feel closest to whatever Sahlins was describing are not the times I have set out to want less. They are the times I have happened to find myself somewhere there is nothing in particular to want. Walking a road in rural Ireland on a cold evening. A long bus journey through the middle of Vietnam. Sitting in a kitchen that has nothing in it except what is needed to make tea. The wants do not go quiet because I have done something. They go quiet because, for that hour, the conditions are right.
