We crave abundance.
We want more and more and more and more.
It hasn't always been like this, but in the past 20 - 30 years the consumer boom has created an abundance toxicity. Everything must be scalable, every business opportunity must be able to be rolled out on a huge and massive scale because profit is all that it's about.
An example of abundance toxicity, how excess of something kills the enjoyment or the benefit:
On holiday in Northumberland in a beautiful place with a golf course through the back gate, there is a small par 3 course of 4 holes, absolutely ideal for a 6 year old boy who is discovering golf. My son was on the par 3 course 13 times in 7 days.
I am really, really lucky that I have enough money to take my son golfing and can buy him almost as many golf balls as he would like. We started the day on the first day with 2 golf balls each. He hit 2, I hit 2 and we moved along. Towards the end of the week we ended up with 4 golf balls each, it wasn't as much fun. Too many golf balls, too much to think about, it didn't matter if you hit a bad shot so you didn't concentrate as much on the shots you were hitting. You would hit 1 into the rough and wouldn't look for it for too long because there were 3 others on the fairway. It's the toxicity of abundance. It becomes overwhelming.
Take iTunes as a classic example, how many songs do you have on iTunes on your phone or on your computer? How often do you listen to those songs? How many songs do you have that you haven't listened to? I bet you have some. A Kindle is even worse, how many books are on your Kindle, if you have one, that you haven't read and that you won't ever read? Kindles are great because they are small for taking books on holiday but people sit with 100 books that they will never read. This is abundance toxicity.
When faced with abundance while trying to make a choice about something significant it can be almost impossible but because we have too much money we buy several things and then never have the opportunity to look at any of them.
Maybe a good place to start to try and understand this is the book 'Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance' Perhaps the opposite of abundance is quality instead of having 100 books on your Kindle, have 2 really, really, really good ones and when you're done with them and really done, then buy 2 more really, really good books. I don't think people do this very much. There is so much for everybody out there that I don't think we have to grab and snatch at abundance and I didn't even talk about the abundance of food.
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