Efficient Is Good. Sufficient Is Necessary.
Efficiency buys us time. Sufficiency teaches us how to live within it.
When Adam Wilson said, “People would rather cover the world in solar panels than learn how things were done in the past,” I felt a pang of recognition. It’s the kind of sentence that doesn’t leave you. We like to think that technology will rescue us from the mess we’ve made, that efficiency will save us. But Adam’s point lands deeper: efficiency without sufficiency is just a more elegant way to keep over-consuming.
It’s easier to imagine a future where we can have everything we have now — the same pace, the same abundance of choice, the same appetites — only powered by wind and sun — than it is to imagine a life that asks us to want less. One vision demands innovation; the other demands humility.
The cultural blind spot
Many “green” solutions of today — electric cars, solar farms, biodegradable plastics — are designed to preserve our consumption patterns, not change them. We treat environmentalism as a swap: replace one input with another, keep the outputs the same. It’s comforting, but it’s not the same as sustainability.
True sustainability means sufficiency. It’s not deprivation; it’s living within a frame where “enough” is both possible and satisfying.
How we once lived
Several generations ago, sufficiency was the default. People preserved food not for novelty but because the winter was long. Communities pooled labor in barn raisings and quilting bees because no single family could spare the necessary hands or tools alone. Seasonal eating wasn’t a virtue signal; it was a fact of life. People weren’t saints — they simply lived within the limits they had.
It’s easy to romanticize the past, but these practices weren’t charming hobbies. They were serious, adaptive ways to make a life work when resources were finite.
Why we abandoned these practices
Industrial food systems, cheap fossil fuels, and global shipping changed the rules. We learned to expect strawberries in January and gadgets shipped in 48 hours. Convenience became a right, and marketing taught us that “making do” meant you were missing out.
In the process, we lost skills — and maybe more importantly, we lost the sense that restraint could be dignified. Sufficiency began to resemble scarcity, and scarcity became something to be feared at all costs.
The path back — with equity in mind
Returning to sufficiency doesn’t mean rolling back the clock. It means weaving the best of old practices into modern life — in ways that don’t burden the same people who have always been asked to do more for less.
It could mean community kitchens that preserve seasonal produce together. Co-op models for tools and equipment so households share rather than each buying their own. Local food subsidies that make organic produce not a luxury but a norm. These are modern echoes of older wisdom, adapted for now.
Choosing the harder path
Efficiency can make a resource last longer. Sufficiency asks us to change our relationship to it altogether. The first is mechanical; the second is moral.
Adam Wilson is right: the work ahead isn’t just building new energy grids — it’s relearning how to live richly within limits. That work is slower, more human, more rooted. And it might be the only way we really sustain the gifts the earth has already given us.
What’s one old way you could bring back — not as nostalgia, but as a way forward?
Patiently and gratefully awaiting your thoughts,
Dan