If you’re reading this blog, the odds are you spend most of your days exposed to a stream of advertisements. Those adverts sell you dissatisfaction, fear and a sense of insufficiency to get you to buy the latest new, improved, shiner, faster thing that you can’t afford and don’t need. It is a planet destroying approach, and constantly undermines our happiness and creates vast social and economic pressure.
The antidote, is to deliberately seek a sense of abundance that doesn’t depend on buying stuff. It’s an approach that doesn’t depend on being wealthy. So long as your basic needs are covered, you can have abundance if you know where to look for it.
There can be a tremendous sense of abundance in giving things away and taking care of other people. The well-off person who is seeking abundance can do it in part by helping others. Donate to the food bank. Give away old clothes. Buy someone lunch. Solve a problem for someone else. You get to feel heroic and powerful, and to make a difference.
There is no greater richness than being time rich. Time is finite, it is the stuff our lives are made of and it is easy to feel like we don’t have enough of it. Time that isn’t scheduled, time to do as you please, to do nothing – this is an incredible abundance to be enjoyed and celebrated. Turn off the machines of an evening, and great swathes of time can appear, rich with possibility. Learning to do nothing is a great antidote to information overload and fast lane nonsense.
Health is another great richness. Devoting time, energy and resources to your mental and physical health improves your quality of life and again, creates that feeling of abundance. If economic activity becomes more important than health, we end up deeply impoverished, ill and miserable. Claim back whatever time and energy you can find to put your health first.
Enjoy the small things. Every day life is full of wonderful small things – moments of beauty, kindness, inspiration, laughter. If you look for them you’ll see them. If your attention is always focused on some distant goal, you may miss all the good things that are right in front of you. Taking the time to enjoy what you’ve got increases feelings of abundance.
Stop treating hard work, long working hours, exhaustion and stress like some kind of virtue. There’s a lot of social support out there for doing this, which is of course why we end up doing it. These are not virtues, these are social ills and we need to free ourselves from them. Celebrate sloth, daydreaming, quietness, non-consumption, lack of speed, days off, and you start celebrating quality of life, not your economic usefulness to someone else.
Abundance is not some future goal to buy our way towards. Abundance is something we can only have if we look for it here and now.