Leadership Quote by Alex Campbell

Campbell’s line is a politician’s way of warning you without sounding like he’s scolding you. It’s framed as a late-breaking discovery ("only now beginning to fully realize"), which does two things at once: it flatters the listener as part of a newly enlightened public, and it sidesteps blame. No one has to admit they chased comfort too hard; history simply arrived at a sober insight.

The core move is the pivot from economics to psychology. "Material pleasure" isn’t condemned on moral grounds; it’s treated like an overused resource that suffers depletion. That’s strategic. In a consumer society, purity talk fails, but exhaustion talk lands. By describing enjoyment as a "capacity" that can "decrease" and become "exhausted", Campbell borrows the language of infrastructure and fiscal limits, translating spiritual malaise into something a policymaker can manage. The subtext: a culture built on endless acquisition eventually loses the ability to feel satisfied, and that numbness has social costs - alienation, resentment, even political instability.

There’s also a quiet critique of the attention economy before the term existed. "Too constantly" is the tell; it’s not abundance that’s the problem, it’s saturation. The implied enemy isn’t a single luxury but the always-on pursuit, the way consumption becomes habit rather than pleasure. As a political statement, it sets up permission for restraint: regulations, public investment, civic projects, even calls for moderation, all justified not as deprivation but as rehabilitation - a recovery of the ability to enjoy anything at all.