Subtracted Abundance
You can live more on less. You don’t need to unconsciously spend your way to abundance, you already have abundance. You just need to tap into it. Abundance commonly is tied to wealth - I would separate the two. Consider abundance as a state of mind rather than a monetary status.
When thinking of abundance, we think of more than enough. Commonly, we don’t feel like we’re enough.
Is this why we don’t feel abundance?
“A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention”
What if the opposite were true as well? Less information creates more attention. When you’re most peaceful, your mind is quiet.
By removing the noise, you gain clarity. Tim Ferris has a great filter for gaining clarity:
“Is this removing a negative from my life?”
By asking this question, you tap into a new perspective for direction. Instead of seeking abundance through addition you see the potential for less being more - subtracted abundance.
Addition through subtraction.
By consuming more you’re falling into the marketing narrative of multi-billion dollar organizations. You’re not enough unless you have the latest and greatest product.
I fall into this materialist consumption myself. It’s not your fault, marketing has improved dramatically. I’ll never forget attending a lunch seminar at a conference in New York in 2019. The company described how their artificial intelligence technology takes your data and curates personalized advertisements based on internet searches. Given Google controls over 85% of the global search engine market share the tracking of your browsing history through cookies has never been easier. They said they can predict buying behavior and will incentivize you to purchase when you’re browsing behavior signals you’re ready. This puts your personal willpower against artificial intelligence - hardly a fair match.
This makes your ability to decide what’s worth your purchase and what’s just noise fuzzy.
Society tells you more is more and companies market directly to that idea. I think the culture is largely to blame here. We live in a society that idolizes the latest and greatest. I’ll never forget the time someone told me I was poor because my iPhone still has a button (& still does BTW - iPhone 8 FTW). That said, I personally could care less about the idea of being “poor” because my iPhone has a button – what ill substance to result in such a judgement.
What if I’m a life maximalist and a material minimalist?
You consciously have to decide to filter the noise to live more on less. There’s a reason Steve Jobs wore the same clothes every day. It’s not because he was short on cash to buy nice clothes. Rather, he didn’t want to waste his precious decision-making capital on such an unimportant decision.
Clothes can send a non-verbal message but as the age old adage states - don’t judge a book by it’s cover. Marketing wants your clothes to say something about you. I’m not saying you shouldn’t present yourself in a fashion in accordance with your values. Rother, this is a slippery slope into living more on more instead of living more on less. Steve Jobs lived more on less through a conscious decision that clothing style wasn’t removing a negative from his life.
I am not who I think I am, I am, who you think, I am, to you. It’s a perception of a perception that we value how others perceive us more than how we perceive ourselves.
“The only thing we perceive are our perceptions”
Being yourself leads to the path of abundance. If your perception of enough is predicated on how you feel others think about you, you can easily lead yourself down a path that isn’t true to you. Is the act of consumption and seeking more for you?
If you were to intentionally seek how others perceive you - what would they say? Would they speak to how much you have or the kind of person you are? Considering the inputs that make up the whole, I’d imagine the determinants of your character matter more than how much (money, clothes, possession, etc.) you have.
Subtract all the things that don’t positively contribute to your character and align with bringing you happiness and peace. Play infinite games that speak to your character and who you are. How do you want to be remembered?
Seek abundance through less not more.