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Kurt Vonnegut was at a party with his friend Joseph Heller, the writer of bestseller Catch-22. The party was being given by a billionaire hedge-fund manager. Vonnegut whispered to Heller: “Joe, how does it make you feel to realize that our host probably makes more money in a single day than you’ve earned in forty years from writing Catch-22?”

“I have something,” Heller said, “that he will never have—the knowledge that I’ve got enough.”50

One study on happiness sought to ascertain if and how happiness is tied to money. An interviewee was heir to an enormous fortune. He testified that what mattered most to him in life was his faith, and that his greatest aspiration was “to love the Lord, my family, and my friends.” As to how much money was enough, he admitted that he personally could never feel truly secure until he had $1 billion in the bank.51

John Bogle, retired CEO of The Vanguard Group, in his book titled Enough, gives his views on this country’s financial system. Bogle says that we have gone from an agricultural economy to a manufacturing one to a service one to what is now a financial one. “We have pinned so much of our collective fortune on extracting value from trading paper,” he insists, “that we are losing our grip on what it means to actually build anything of value, let alone how to serve others.”52

Joseph Heller said that the question he was addressing in Catch-22 was: “What does a sane person do in an insane society?” Einstein gave this as his answer: “There are some things that count that can’t be counted, and some things that can be counted that don’t count.”

How much money do we need? Wendell Berry’s answer is: “To make a living is not to make a killing; it’s to have enough.”