ABUNDANCE - How the Abundance Mindset is Destroying the Planet

Bamboo trees in a bamboo grove

 I first heard about the Abundance mindset whilst reading Stephen Coveys book “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People”. I love this book and have received a lot from the models and advice found within – including the abundance mindset.

What is the abundance mindset?

The Abundance mindset is often contrasted with the Scarcity mindset – the idea that there is a shortage of everything. If there is a cake, and lots of people want to eat it, then there will be no cake left for me, therefore I must get there before everyone else and take as much of the cake as possible.

The abundance mindset is the opposite of this. If there is a cake, then there is enough for everybody, therefore I don’t need to fight others for it or be underhanded, we can all have a slice.

We can see the merits of this model. It essentially says, “You don’t have to climb over others to get ahead, you don’t have to be underhanded, it doesn’t have to be dog eat dog, we can work together and produce something better together”.

However

With every analogy, there is a point where it goes too far.

In the Abundance mindset, it is when we start to believe that all resources are infinite.

For many the abundance mindset says “I can have what I want, the nice cars, the big house, the latest technology etc, there is an abundance of everything, therefore as long as I’m not directly stopping someone else from having it, we can all have a slice of the cake.

Yes, there is a point that we can, for example, always grow more trees, but we must be planting trees faster than we are chopping them down, as well as seeing them through to full maturity.

We can look at it in the light of Gandhi’s quote;
“there is enough for everybody’s need, but not enough for everybody’s greed”.

We must acknowledge the finiteness, and relative finiteness, of certain resources, and ask ourselves if the abundance mindset really fits here.

Research shows that if all people in the world lived as those do in the developed world, we would need another 4 planets worth of resources to sustain it.

This isn’t a call back to the scarcity mindset, it is a call for us to check if we are using the abundance mindset as a cover over for our greed.

May we pull the veil of our intentions back, may we search our hearts for greed, and may we have the audacity to make the necessary changes to our lives.

Comments

Post a Comment

* indicates required

Popular posts from this blog

If God is All Good and All Powerful, Why Does Suffering Exist?

Image
Philosopher Alvin Plantinga called the problem of suffering “the only good objection to God”. The often quoted argument goes:  “if God is all good (all benevolent) then God has the desire to end suffering, and if God is all-powerful (omnipotent) then God has the ability to end suffering. Therefore if God does not end suffering, then God is either not all good, or is not all-powerful, and is therefore not God”. As Christians, we need to be able to answer this objection to God, to enable us to “give a reason for the faith that we have in Christ Jesus” (1 Peter 3:15). To this end, I want to try and answer this question to help anybody who finds the problem of suffering to be a sticking point or an obstacle in their faith (an argument to explain the problem of suffering is called a “theodicy”). To begin with, I want to go back to the beginning of it all and look at God. Who is God and what is God like? It is worth noting here that this argument takes as given the f...
Keep reading

The Surprising Truth About The Differences Between The Temptation Narratives of Matthew and Luke and What They Teach Us About Overcoming Temptation

Image
  5 MINUTE READ We are now well into Lent , one of the two great fasts in the Christian Calendar ( along with Advent ). Lent is the time when we contemplate Christ’s sacrifice, along with Christ’s 40 days of temptation in the wilderness. When we give up things for Lent we find ourselves tempted in similar, yet far less extreme, circumstances (Let’s be honest, who wants to hang out in the wilderness by themselves for 40 days and eat and drink nothing; I can barely handle giving up chocolate!). Much writing during this time consists of looking at the temptations of Jesus, and how Jesus overcame them as a template for our own overcoming of temptations. But in this post, I do not intend to look at the traditional views, but rather to look at the differences between how Matthew and Luke told the story of Christ’s temptation and what we can learn from these differences. Let’s look at them now. Why Differences are OK We do not like to discuss differences in ...
Keep reading

SANDWICHES - Enhance Your Reading of Mark's Gospel

Image
As followers of Christ, we look to the Bible as one of our main sources of inspiration and guides in our lives. So it follows that we all want our times reading the Bible to be as rich as possible. Learning more about the Bible is one way to help with this. It is particularly helpful when we know the types of things that the authors of the books used to aid us in this task. To this end I wanted to talk about something that has enriched my reading of the gospel of Mark: Markan Sandwiches (also called interpolations ). Essentially, what Mark does is get one story within his gospel, and inserts it inside another story ; this serves the purpose of giving both stories a greater sense of meaning. It’s purpose is to make the reader stop and think “Mark is trying to tell us something important here”. In practice it looks like this: Story 1 – Introduction Story 2 – Introduction & Conclusion Story 1 – Conclusion We can see where the idea of the sandwich com...
Keep reading