I sometimes think we’re allergic to plenty.
We say we want abundance, but when it stares us in the face, we look away. We prefer the safety of scarcity, because scarcity gives us a script: save, hoard, compete, ration. Abundance strips that script away. It forces us to improvise, to ask what a life is for when necessity no longer defines it. That’s not a line of inquiry many people welcome.
I grew up with the gospel of limits. Every adult I knew believed in shortage: of jobs, of money, of time. There was never enough. My grandmother clipped coupons, my Father reminded me of everything we couldn’t afford. We talk and we live as if the whole world had been engineered to keep us small. But in truth, most of us are living like kings compared to our ancestors. Louis XIV had more land, more silk, more power. But he never tasted a mango in January. He never flew across the ocean in a day. He never Googled a cure. He never had antibiotics. He never streamed Bach on demand.
We are drowning in abundance. That’s the scandal of the present age.
Take food. A hundred years ago, most of humanity staggered through life underfed. Now, the problem is metabolic disease in one place and starvation next door. The world produces more than enough calories to feed everyone. We choose not to distribute it well. That is a moral failure, not an economic one.
Take knowledge. The Library of Alexandria was burned once and lost forever. Now, a teenager in Cleveland with Wi-Fi has more knowledge at hand than the entire Enlightenment Republic of Letters. And what does he do with it? He doomscrolls TikTok. He plays with AI filters. He posts memes. We have democratized the wisdom of the ages, and we use it as a mindless distraction.
Take energy. In 1973, America had a national panic over oil. Politicians rationed gasoline. Lines at the pump stretched for miles. That memory still governs policy today, like a ghost refusing to leave the room. But the story has flipped. Shale drilling has created a glut. Solar and wind are scaling beyond what even optimists imagined twenty years ago. Fusion, the old sci-fi dream, is suddenly plausible. Instead of shortage, the puzzle is storage and transmission.
Abundance is here, and it terrifies us.
We are not prepared, culturally or psychologically, for a world of plenty. Our religions are built on sacrifice. Our moral codes are built on thrift. Our politics are built on grievance. What happens when none of those make sense? When life expectancy keeps rising, when technology erases drudgery, when the old gods of scarcity are exposed as frauds?
The Greeks understood this dilemma. Hesiod wrote that Pandora opened the jar and released all evils into the world. Only hope remained. But what if hope itself becomes the curse, when abundance makes hope unnecessary? Without the pressure of survival, the human soul grows restless. As material life improves, dissatisfaction grows. Our appetite is infinite, and abundance feeds the appetite rather than quenching it.
I think this is why so many people today seem angry and hollow. The contradictions gnaw at them. They live with medicine, travel, luxuries, and freedoms no Roman emperor dreamed of. But they feel cheated. Why? Because abundance dismantles excuses. You can no longer say, “I would write a book if only I had time.” You have the time. You waste it on screens. You can no longer say, “I would be happy if I had choice.” You have infinite choice. And the paralysis of choice crushes you.
The heresy I want to suggest is simple: abundance is a moral trial greater than scarcity. Scarcity disciplines. It forces you to structure life around what must be done. Abundance tempts you to dissolve into sloth, grievance, resentment. The great danger of our era is not deprivation. It’s decadence. Gibbon wrote about Rome’s decline in precisely these terms: the empire all but rotted from luxury.
I’m not advocating a return to sackcloth and ashes. I feel zero nostalgia for a world of coal dust and polio. But I am saying that abundance demands new virtues. Gratitude, for one. Moderation, for another. And above all, purpose. If necessity no longer commands us, then we must command ourselves. The 21st century will not be shaped by unavoidable, unsolvable famine or plague. It will be shaped by whether human beings can handle plenty without going mad.
This will enrage some folks. People want to cling to their scarcity narrative. It gives them dignity. It lets them say they are victims of systems, of elites, of conspiracies. But the harsher truth is that we are victims of ourselves. We cannot blame hunger when the pantry is overflowing. We cannot blame ignorance when the library is in our pocket. We cannot blame powerlessness when the tools are in our hands.
The prophets of doom will insist the planet is exhausted. They’ll point to climate change, to migration, to inequality. These are serious. But they are not proof of shortage. They are proof of our failure to govern abundance wisely. Climate change is not the product of scarcity. It’s the product of so much energy we could not control it. Inequality is not the product of any natural order. It’s the product of wealth piling in the wrong places. Migration is not the product of a world without opportunity. It’s the product of opportunity existing in some places and not others.
I refuse to believe we are doomed. I believe abundance is here. The problem is that abundance terrifies us. It strips away our excuses. It asks what we are for. And most people would rather cling to grievance than face that question.
I cannot live that way. I want to live as if abundance is real, even if that means asking harder questions. If the pantry is full, why am I hungry? If the library is infinite, why am I ignorant? If the world is open, why do I feel trapped?
The answers are unlikely to be comforting. But they’re worth pursuing, all the same.
Because if abundance is the condition of our age, then the poverty is inside us.
