Maybe I’ve had an unearned lunch and a beer. Maybe I’m staring out at the yard, noticing some weeds that need weeding, something that needs to be cleaned, or a project I still need to tackle. Maybe I’m trying to get in a nap but can’t quite fall asleep, at least not for long. Whatever the circumstances, the feeling is usually the same.
Just two days earlier, it was Friday. I was looking forward to a long weekend. Then Saturday arrived, I woke up too early, stupidly reached for my phone, and before I knew it Saturday night had come and gone. Sunday morning followed close behind. A few chores. A few errands. A little relaxation. A little guilt. And then, somehow, the weekend was over.
Tomorrow is Monday. Here we go again.
The thought that often runs through my mind is not that I need another vacation or another weekend. It’s something deeper and harder to articulate. It feels more like the realization that I am about to spend another week pursuing meaningful ends through means I don’t particularly enjoy.
I don’t work because I enjoy mortgage payments, insurance premiums, or paying college tuition. I work because I love my family and want to provide for them. I don’t save money because spreadsheets bring me joy. I save money because I want security and freedom. Yet somewhere along the way, the means have begun to consume so much of my time and attention that they often obscure the ends they were meant to serve.
The ancient Greeks had a word for the public marketplace: the agora. It was the center of civic life, commerce, politics, conversation, ambition, and status. People gathered there to buy, sell, negotiate, persuade, compete, and advance their interests.
The agora still exists. It simply no longer occupies a town square.
Today it lives in our pockets. It follows us through our inboxes, text messages, social media feeds, calendars, mortgage statements, insurance bills, medical appointments, performance reviews, long sales cycles, home projects, and endless reminders that we should somehow be doing better than we’re doing. The modern agora never closes.
Whether one believes in the divine or not, it is difficult to ignore the pattern. Across cultures and centuries, people repeatedly concluded that a life spent entirely in the marketplace was a life out of balance.
For thousands of years, human beings seemed to understand something that we may have forgotten. Nearly every civilization developed practices that intentionally pulled people away from the marketplace. They built temples, churches, monasteries, shrines, gardens, and retreats. They observed Sabbaths. They fasted. They prayed. They climbed mountains. They crossed deserts. They sought silence.
The marketplace is where we acquire things. It is not where we learn what things are worth acquiring.
Our age, however, has become remarkably confident that we can live without these rhythms. We imagine ourselves more enlightened than our ancestors. We no longer need sacred spaces, holy days, quiet reflection, or disciplines designed to pull us out of the current. We have podcasts, streaming services, social media, online shopping, and an endless supply of information right at our fingertips. We have become extraordinarily good at remaining occupied.
Yet for all our progress, many of us remain strangely restless.
The agora is very good at promising relief. Work a little harder. Earn a little more. Lose a little weight. Upgrade the house. Fix the yard. Answer the emails. Reach the next milestone. Get through this week and then you’ll finally be able to relax.
The problem is that the finish line keeps moving.
You answer one email and three more arrive. You complete one project and discover two more. You pay one bill and another appears. You survive one week only to find Monday waiting patiently for your return. The marketplace can satisfy many desires, but it possesses a remarkable ability to generate new ones.
Lately, I’ve found myself wondering how much of my exhaustion comes not from work itself, but from the feeling that I am spending so much of my life in the agora that I rarely leave it long enough to remember why I’m there.
Like many people, I’ve often imagined what life would look like if money were no longer a concern. Not billionaire money. Just enough. Enough to stop worrying. Enough to step away from work that no longer energizes me. Enough to spend my time where I choose.
For me, that number is about ten million dollars.
I can picture it clearly. I’d still build websites. I’d continuously improve the ones I already have. I’d deeply study religion. I’d read more. I’d buy and renovate rental properties. I’d create things. I’d learn new things. I’d finally carve out a study of my own where I could sit quietly and think and whether nothing would be expected of me.
What strikes me about that fantasy is that it contains surprisingly little idleness. I don’t really want freedom from work. I want freedom from obligation. I want my efforts to be directed toward things that feel meaningful rather than merely necessary.
Yet the older I get, the less convinced I am that money is the whole answer. It would solve many real problems. I would worry less. I would sleep better. I would enjoy flying first class and having someone else deal with many of life’s administrative burdens. But even in that imagined future, certain concerns would remain. I would still worry about my health. I would still worry about my children and my wife. I would still wonder whether I was spending my limited years wisely. I would still have to confront the uncomfortable reality that I am not going to live forever. I will die and I'll always be aware of that fact.
The money solves many problems, but it does not solve the problem. The problem, I suspect, is that what I’m actually pursuing is not wealth, it is contentment. A deep, abiding sense that this moment is enough. That my life is enough. That I am enough.
Oddly enough, the moments when I come closest to that feeling rarely occur in the agora. They tend to arrive in places where the demands stop for a while.
Sometimes it’s after finishing a truly difficult project. The garage is finally clean. The shelves are built. The yard lights are hanging exactly where they should. Exhaustion and satisfaction arrive together, and for a brief moment the voice that says, “You should be doing something else,” falls silent.
Sometimes it’s on an airplane heading on vacation. Suspended thirty thousand feet above the earth, I become temporarily unreachable. No one needs anything from me. No problems need be solved. No email can be answered. The world keeps spinning without my participation.
Often this feeling also occurs in church. Not because all my worries disappear, nor because I suddenly become a better person. Rather, church remains one of the few places left in modern life where nothing is being sold to me. Nobody cares what I drive, what I earn, how much I weigh, how many websites I’ve built, or whether I had a productive week. For an hour, I am relieved of the burden of proving that I matter; I KNOW I matter.
Perhaps that is why human beings have always created sacred spaces. Not merely to worship, but to remember. To remember that we are more than consumers. More than workers. More than accumulators of wealth, status, and possessions. More than the sum of our accomplishments.
There is an irony here that I cannot quite shake. The word agoraphobia literally means a fear of the marketplace. Modern man seems afflicted by the opposite condition. We no longer fear the marketplace; we fear leaving it. We carry it into our bedrooms, onto our vacations, into our relationships, and even into our moments of rest. The marketplace once occupied a corner of the city. Now it occupies a corner of our minds.
And so, we increasingly consult it for answers to questions it was never designed to answer. What makes a life meaningful? What is enough? How should I spend the years I have left?
No marketplace can answer those questions because they are not economic questions. They are human questions. Spiritual questions, perhaps. Questions our ancestors spent centuries wrestling with before we were even born.
When I imagine myself at eighty-five, I don’t picture a balance sheet. I don’t picture a stock portfolio, a collection of cars, or even a list of accomplishments. I picture my wife and children saying that I lived a good life. I picture being remembered for wisdom rather than wealth. I picture having become the sort of man people sought out for counsel rather than money. This makes me wonder whether I already know what matters.
Perhaps my exhaustion comes from spending so much time in the agora that I occasionally forget what I was actually trying to buy there.
On Sunday afternoons, as another week approaches, I still find myself fantasizing about another raise, another weekend, another vacation, another project, a chilly cocktail, or another few million dollars. Some of those things would undoubtedly help.
But if I’m honest, they aren’t what I’ve been looking for all along.
What I’ve been looking for is contentment.
And I’m beginning to understand the agora was never selling it.