Abundance

Abundance can be a beautiful thing. 

• You have enough food. 
• You have a place to live. 
• You have the resources to pay your bills and save some of your income for the future. 
• You may even have the time and money to take your family on vacation every year.

As human beings, we’re good at running our lives chasing abundance. It’s probably wired into us, as our ancestors pursued similar goals of abundance for centuries and centuries. 

It’s likely more about the journey of pursuing abundance rather than the destination. 

We’re good at the journey part. 

However, once we arrive at abundance, we lose the advantage of our genetic coding. 

Permanent abundance is not something humans ever got to, with the rarest exceptions. 

Today, billions of people have achieved a state of permanent abundance. 

And now, as a society, we may, for the first time, have problems of permanent abundance. 

• Our houses are cluttered with stuff.
• We have access to so much food, much of it is unhealthy and abundantly easy to access - leading to diseases like obesity, heart disease, and diabetes. 
• Ditto for alcohol, drugs, and cigarettes.
• We can drive everywhere, so we hardly walk or ride our bikes. 
• We spend a lot of time researching things to buy that we maybe don’t need. Then, we also spend much time returning some of those things. 

The problem with achieving permanent abundance is genetically speaking, it's not really considered to be a problem. So we have a very hard time solving it. We might belittle it as a "first world" problem. That's maybe true. But it can still depress and worst case scenario kill people.

• 9 million people die from hunger every year. That's a too little problem.
• 8 million people die from tobacco use every year. That's a too much problem.
• 1.5 million people die from diabetes every year. That's a too much problem.
• 2.8 million people die from obesity every year. That's a too much problem.
• 3 million people die from alcohol-related causes. That's a too much problem.
• 600,000 people died due to drug use. That's a too much problem.

(all data comes from the World Health Organization)

A lack of abundance is still a huge issue.

But so is having too much abundance.

We are so used to the idea of chasing abundance that we try to solve an abundance issue by looking for more things to buy, more food to eat, bigger houses, and nicer cars. 

We try to solve the problem of abundance by chasing more abundance. 

When you have a problem of more, the answer usually is less.