Compare & Despair
On scrolling, scarcity, and enoughness.
I’ve noticed a disturbing pattern among artists around me—and in myself.
Call it a ceiling on joy. An unspoken threshold that limits how much metaphorical sunshine we’ll let hit our skin.
It’s especially present when we reach milestones or hit benchmarks. We’ve trained ourselves to brace for the falloff before we’ve even tasted the sweetness of the moment. We anticipate the comedown before the chorus ends.
And it shows up day-to-day, too—the casual scroll into compare-and-despair oblivion: measuring our own worth against someone else’s wins, openings, press, or views. Quietly, and constantly, gauging where we stand in the invisible hierarchy of “enough.”
Together these reflexes form an emotional dome, held up by a scaffolding of not-enoughness. A structure built by our culture, our industry, and our habits.
So that’s where we’re heading this week: deep into the architecture of lack, to see what it’s made of—and, hopefully, find a few cracks where joy can leak back in.
Let’s go.
The Addiction to Not-Enough
Addiction, at its core, is any pattern we return to for relief that ultimately causes us harm. It’s the attempt to regulate something unbearable inside us with something outside us.
For artists, that unbearable thing is often the question: Am I good enough?
There’s no real scoreboard for it. The work is subjective. The market is unstable. There’s no final answer. So the mind does what it always does when faced with uncertainty—it looks for a foothold.
Not-enoughness is that foothold. It’s a bad answer, but it’s an answer. It gives the chaos shape. It quiets the existential noise, at least for a moment. If I’m not enough, there’s something to chase.
The irony is that not-enoughness comforts us precisely because it’s familiar. It’s easier to find evidence of lack than evidence of sufficiency. So we keep returning to what confirms the story we already believe. It doesn’t feel good, but it feels known. And known feels safe.
The internet supercharged the supply chain. Endless feeds offer an infinite drip of other people’s triumphs—each one a convenient mirror for our own perceived inadequacy. It’s the easiest substance to access: free, fast, and socially encouraged.
And then comes the crash. The scroll ends. The proof dissolves. The question returns: Where do I fall? That’s the cruel genius of the addiction—it never resolves what it promises to fix. It just keeps us busy enough not to feel the ache of the question itself.
If the goal is “sobriety from not-enoughness,” the first step isn’t affirmation—it’s honesty. Seeing how the belief functions as protection. Naming that it once kept us safe. And asking what other mechanisms are keeping the belief believable.
Foreboding Joy
Sometimes, even when things are good, the body still flinches. It’s as if joy itself triggers the craving for control. And that’s where we meet the next layer: foreboding joy.
It’s that micro-flinch when something beautiful arrives—an opening night, a yes, a moment that feels almost too pure—and the nervous system reaches for the brake before the heart can press play.
Joy is vulnerable because it implies risk: if I let this in, I could lose it. If I feel this fully, I might feel the ending fully, too.
This is why even “wins” can feel oddly muted. We’re not ungrateful; we’re armored. The mind starts contingencies, the body tightens its perimeter, and the present gets managed instead of felt. It’s not dramatic—no spiral, no meltdown—just a subtle dimmer switch on delight.
Foreboding joy is a trade: numb the top so the drop won’t hurt.
It’s harm-reduction for the heart—understandable, adaptive, and costly. Because art asks for presence, and presence requires exposure.
So what helps? The answer is surprisingly simple.
Practicing Sufficiency
If not-enoughness is the reach, foreboding joy is the recoil—the instinct to hide from the very thing we wanted.
And what helps, I think, is learning to stay. To stay in the moment after the good thing happens. To stay when nothing’s happening at all. To stay without needing to measure the staying.
Sufficiency isn’t a mood; it’s a muscle. It’s the slow strengthening of our capacity to hold what is—without immediately translating it into what could, should, or might be. It doesn’t sound glamorous because it isn’t. It’s repetition. It’s noticing the reflex to reach and choosing, gently, to root.
It starts small. A deep breath. A full sip of water. A tiny moment of gratitude—the warmth of the sun, the smell of coffee, the feeling of clean bedsheets. These aren’t affirmations; they’re anchor points—tiny proofs that now is enough.
The more we rehearse that, the more we widen our nervous system’s window for joy. We stop needing to numb the top or chase the next. Joy becomes bearable because it’s allowed to coexist with fear, and worth no longer depends on evidence.
That’s the quiet miracle of sufficiency: nothing changes, and everything does.
The work, the wins, the applause—they can still thrill us.
They just don’t own us.
One last thing…
I’ll be honest—this is a piece I’ve been avoiding writing for months.
It’s prickly, personally. This mix of not-enoughness and foreboding joy has been with me for as long as I can remember. Some days, it hums quietly in the background. Other days, it drowns out the melody.
I’m not sharing this in search of sympathy. I just think it’s worth saying out loud that this practice—showing up to write every week, to make something, to make sense of something—is how I process what’s present in a way that feels productive. It’s how I wrestle with compare and despair, and try to turn them into something that might help someone else in the process.
And every so often, the light gets in. Joy wiggles its way through the doubt. The sweetness usually arrives right after something clicks—when a foggy idea or a jumble of hunches suddenly takes form. A truth gets shape.
And right then—in that split second—the shame, the shoulds, the judgments, and the fear fade down just enough that I can hear the jazz saxophone glide over the bass line. Unpredictable. Alive. Smooth.
That’s what enough sounds like to me. At least for today.
If you need a place to start, maybe just pause the next time something feels good—and stay. Don’t rush to the next thing. Don’t analyze it. Just notice it. Let the band play.
And say, thank you for the music.
See you next week ♥️
—Matt