Scarcity Vs Abundance
The phone rings. He’s a friend of yours who just landed a recurring role on a big TV series. She is ecstatic; her voice sings and screams with high-pitched excitement. She is very grateful to share her moment with you. Despite your genuine desire to rejoice at your friend’s good news, a pang of anxiety flares in the pit of your stomach. Your heart starts to race, your breathing becomes shallow, your face turns red, you even feel like crying. Worst of all, you feel ashamed of your inability to enjoy your friend’s success.
When you have a full, visceral response to hearing someone else’s achievement, it can be indicative of a deep psycho-spiritual conditioning known as scarcity mentality. The scarcity mindset is a worldview rooted in the belief that there is not enough. There is not enough success, not enough wealth, not enough love to go around. The scarcity mentality adage is that someone must lose for you to win.
This mindset is often coded early in life. If we experience childhoods where in fact “there wasn’t enough,” where our physical, emotional, or spiritual needs weren’t met, scarcity can easily become the lens through which we view the world. This worldview often motivates tremendous momentum, but it also leaves us hypervigilant, incessantly comparing and competing with those around us, and making us fundamentally distrustful of life.
The opposite of a scarcity mentality is an abundance mentality. An abundance paradigm sees the world in terms of unlimited potential, where there is the possibility of enough for everyone. If you identify with a scarcity mindset, you may view the above sentence with skepticism and rejection, or equate an abundance perspective with a misleading utopian vision. Rather than a Pollyanna-style denial of injustice, however, an abundance mindset sees the world’s inequalities as stemming from individual and collective awareness of scarcity. World hunger is not the result of a food shortage, it is a product of national and global policies rooted in greed and scarcity. While there may be a finite amount of oil on earth, there is a vast amount of alternative energy available.
An abundance mindset is based on the spiritual principle of interconnectedness. Abundance allows us to experience ourselves as more than just separate animals at war with each other over the last bit of food, but as part of a collective where everyone has a vital role to play, and we are in this together. While competition still plays a natural role in daily life, when an expectation is disappointed, when someone else gets the job, the sting isn’t so immense as to shake your core. It doesn’t become a Herculean task to wish someone well because you have an innate trust that they will take care of you too.
What is so pernicious about a scarcity mentality is that it is a self-fulfilling prophecy. When you see that the world is short and you perceive the success of others as a threat, you project an air of desperation that is discouraging towards opportunity. The old adage “don’t network, make friends” comes to mind. When you go into a situation from a scarcity mindset, all you see is what others can do for you. This agenda is transparent and often makes people run! When you can rest in a place of abundance, you open yourself up to be of service. You are able to authentically connect with others and radiate an attractive and positive energy. Wisdom traditions throughout the centuries reiterate that you only get what you give. This does not mean martyrdom, nor does it mean feigning philanthropy, or repressing jealousy or shadow. It means doing the inner work of dismantling scarcity conditioning and realigning yourself with an abundance mindset that can foster inspiration and generosity for yourself and others. Ultimately, it’s a much easier way to live.
Copyright Meredith Hines MA 2011
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