Funded Abundance

We all need to eat. To eat, we need money. To get money, we need to be paid. One of the fundamental parts of getting paid is the container. The shape and form that holds what it is you offer. 

Without constraints, an offer is a gift. That is because we don’t get paid based on the stable, known, countable, intrinsic value of what we do. We get paid based on supply and demand. We get paid based on scarcity. If something is incredibly valuable AND plentiful, it will have a low price – water, oxygen, love. 

It is possible to free yourself from the constraints of what makes money. If something/someone else makes money for you. You can be born rich. You can marry into money. You can surround yourself with rich generous friends. You can be born in the right country. You can have significant natural skills that set you apart. 

Otherwise, you just need to listen deeply to the signals given by price. What are people paying for? In what containers? How do you develop the skills and knowledge in those containers? It sounds cold, and in some ways it is. 

You start where you are, and you work to release yourself from constraints that don’t work for you. Chipping away with small, achievable goals that add up. Gradually building capacity for abundance funded by scarcity.

Shape and Form

Moving with Grace

It’s not all about you. Part of letting go of anxiety is not feeling like you are being judged in each and every moment. Where your waves of worry are about real problems, rather than perceptions of you. 

When you decide to start paying attention beyond the boundary of yourself, and connect to more, it is a bit of an existential crisis with no clear answer. At least worrying about yourself has very skin and bone constraints! 

Philosophers like William MacAskill and Peter Singer look at effective altruism in a world where we have to think about constraints. Resources aren’t abundant. Opportunities aren’t abundant. Scarcity is real, and scarcity puts up prices and creates walls. Abundance is free and open. 

What is a reasonable amount to consume? How should we think about other people who don’t have enough? Capital provides a foundation and starting point that changes the game. If you stop living hand-to-mouth, and you build up capacity to think long term. 

Moving from day-to-day, to week-to-week, to month-to-month, to year-to-year, to the point where your short-term decisions are connected and constructive. Where you can absorb difficult times, learn from them, and respond in an empowered way. 

Where you move through life with an additional level of grace not available to those who are being flung around by the elements.

moving through and with the elements

Real Value

Find value in the abundant that is neither contained nor containable. Find value in things that are difficult to monetise. When you want to be paid, provide solutions that are easy to monetise. 

To put a price on something, you need shape and form. To see value, you need to look beyond superficial structure. To see what others don't. To price, you need to simplify into a clear ask and offer. To see value, you need to relax into complexity that may exist beyond words and pictures. 

To make money, you need to listen to the signals of the market, be adjustable, and move with the problems as they arise and are solved. As the situation changes, the useful containers change. Real value is more consistent and dependable than the temporary containers we use. 

We create space for real value by getting spending under control. Carefully choosing the containers we are prepared to pay for. Building internal spending discipline is fundamental to being able to handle the waves of money anxiety. That anxiety comes from placing our value in external containers that are not of our choosing or creation.

Artist: Alex Rennie

Enough to go Around

If you tie your identity and incentives to your job and pay, the stress and shocks of money will drive your anxiety. Hunter-Gatherers may have also lived hand-to-mouth, but that is a false analogy because they were living off the land (a form of capital which produced opportunity). They had the option of moving in tough times. We live in containers which restrict our movement (countries, job qualifications) and do not all have the option of a menu of skills which provide almost certain payback if mastered (hunting and gathering). 

Modern hand-to-mouth living means spending all you earn, without the option of earning more if that is not enough. When there is more than enough, simply consuming it. Adjusting spending up if income rises. The trick is to slowly separate from that. To see value in things that are abundant, and put your money to work solving scarcity. “Democratic Goods” are things where there is sufficient supply that everyone who wants it, can have it... at a reasonable price. 

Price surges when there is not enough to go around. Price surges when we borrow to buy at a price we can’t afford... because there is not enough to go around. If you can find and see value in things where there is sustainably enough to go around, you can detach from the relentless stresses and violent shocks of scarcity. 

Gathering Honey

See the Value

One of the ways to gain control of your spending is to select where you place value. To find value in the plentiful rather than in the scarce. Spending is often a team sport, and changing your habits can be incredibly difficult. 

Like trying to become more vegetarian in a South African meat-eating culture. It is painless to change habits if the tweak feels better. If it is simple to make vegetarian food, and you enjoy how it tastes, it will be a smoother transition to eating less meat. If you feel like you are punishing yourself and being a martyr because everyone else is eating what you want, and you don’t like what is on your plate, it is going to be incredibly difficult. We get a quota of self-discipline, and if you use it all up in one area, it can explode in another. “Everything in moderation, including moderation”. 

Build changes to behaviour realistically, gradually, and sustainably. Planning is not about epiphanies. Break-through-weekends are followed by Monday alarm clocks and deep soaked patterns. To make real change, see the value in things that you did not before. Tweak your drivers and incentives. Deep, slow, conscious re-programming. The self-imposed limits stop feeling like chains because you experience the world differently. 

“Save more later” is an approach where the goal is not to adjust your spending up if your income goes up, or you get an unexpected boost. Where you snap the sense that life is better if you spend more, and spoil yourself because “you are worth it”. Reward yourself with the abundant. Put your money to work.

Changing Habits

Wildly Constrained

“Rewilding is about letting nature take care of itself, enabling natural processes to shape land and sea, repair damaged ecosystems and restore degraded landscapes. Through rewilding, wildlife’s natural rhythms create wilder, more biodiverse habits” (rewildingeurope.com). Rewilding is David Attenborough’s call to arms in his witness statement, “A Life on our Planet”. He points out that “a species can only thrive when everything around it thrives too.” I don’t buy into Abundance culture. I can’t, having been born in Apartheid South Africa. The world has constraints. We have to solve the dual problem that we are consuming too much, and yet masses of us are living in poverty. In “Stubborn Attachments”, Tyler Cowen talks about Maximum Sustainable Growth. We need to grow our way out of poverty, while rethinking growth. Rethinking consumption. Rethinking how we impose ourselves on the world. And getting wilder.

Abundance in Constraint

The median (half have less) disposable income for UK households (2.4 people) is £29,400. After reading William MacAskill and Peter Singer who study Effective Altruism, I decided it was worth aiming to live off an income of less than £2,000 a month. Aiming for less seems very counterintuitive in a bigger-better-more world. If you believe in abundance, then it also seems unnecessary. Why self-impose constraint? I don’t believe resources are abundant, and grapple with conspicuous consumption in a world with structural apartheid. Poverty is still very real, and mostly apportioned by our compounded historic prejudices. Sustainability is also clearly a pressing issue. I am all for Maximum Sustainable Growth, but how we co-ordinate means we can’t think in isolation. 1s and 0s (digital pleasures) and walks are abundant. Big houses, cars, and plane trips clearly aren’t. I do believe in win-win growth. Someone rising up doesn’t have to be a threat, but how we count, what we count, and where/if we grow does need reflection. You can still lean into true abundance within empowering constraints.

Developing Tastes

Boths the ins and outs matter in building financial security. Because value is personal, it is possible to decouple how much you spend and the value you get. By spending better. Develop your skill at finding pleasure and meaning consciously. Not everything can be counted. Being aware of what you value can improve the quality of your decisions. No one else can do that work for you. Since we are trigger happy, our attention follows our thoughts and our thoughts are triggered by what we give relevance to. Out of sight, out of mind. Lots of pleasure and meaning is available from abundant sources. Be a seller of scarcity, and a buyer of abundance. Develop your senses. Your vocabulary of pleasure. Your taste. Develop wealth capacity by increasing the number of things you enjoy. Cultural Billionaires master the art of being able to adapt, adjust, and accommodate. They see more value because they are looking.

Abundant Rhubarb? Develop a taste.

Beyond You

Financial Yoga recognises that not all ideas are good business ideas. You can’t always define yourself in the way you truly want to if you insist on packaging “that” (you) as a business idea. Most people have to be their initial source. They have to personally take on the role of Productive Asset, and figure out a way to generate an income. There are lots of things that are of incredible value that are awful business ideas. Start by accepting that. You have to articulate an Ask/Offer. Not everything can be expressed in words. You have to have something you can count. Not everything can be counted. There has to be some control over supply and demand. Some things of incredible value are abundant. The random cards you have been dealt (talents, wiring, community, world view) can be tweaked with a lot of effort. With daily practice. Gradually you can release the obstacles that define you. You can free yourself from the constraints of what makes you a good business. You can start to look at what makes a good business (beyond you). You can use good businesses to power good ideas. Expanding your possibilities.

Scarcity and Abundance

Life preparation was very gendered in the bubble I grew up in. One example of this was that Mathematics was compulsory in High School for boys, but not for girls. I lived in a Patriarchal society where men ruled outside the home, and women ruled inside. Feminism was rising (at a lag), but it was very much focused on Choice for women. No pressure (different pressure). What would you like to do (you should probably do this)? Let’s chip away at the obvious obstacles (well, do our best). Girls doing Boys’ things is serious. Boys doing Girls’ things is funny. Implicitly acknowledging a hierarchy of where we place value. For Boys, choices were squashed and pragmatism was promoted. How are you going to put food on the table? Put childish choices aside. Man up. The horrible truth of the world is that if you follow what you love, it is often harder to monetise. In part, because a fundamental of love is abundance, and a fundamental of money-making is scarcity. In a gendered world, it was women who focused on love, and men who financed it.

Unwinding Scarcity

More than Enough

Intrinsic Value is the idea that something has an internal worth separate from the price. Price is a communication tool. A crude number that triggers exchange where for one person the value is more (buyer), and for one person the value is less (seller). Value doesn’t need to be quantified unless it needs to be communicated. To be reduced to a number. To be managed. I like the idea of Democratic Goods. A high price is a better indication of scarcity than value. Like a pressure cooker, not enough to go around pushes the price up. If there is more than enough for everyone, the price is likely to be lower. Value sits separately, and doesn’t care about things like success, respect, hierarchy and peacocks. A good rule of thumb for not paying a scarcity premium is asking whether everyone has access to this thing? Can everyone afford it? Buy Democratic Goods. Sell Conspicuous Consumption.

Informed Consent

Nothing kills an activist like work deadlines, a mortgage, and school fees. Markets work best when there is full transparency, understanding, and the intent to build a relationship. Most importantly, markets work best when there is informed consent and no regret. When sellers are not manipulative, and buyers are fully aware of the trade-offs they are making. The number one rule of wealth creation is “Never be a forced buyer or seller”. The word No is the foundation of freedom, even if we are defined by what we say Yes to. As our responsibilities grow, our fixed expenses ratchet up (because of a world where success is defined by more). Each Yes and No becomes embodied rather than a conscious choice. Ironically, it becomes harder to get a gap between income and expenses with each increase (if you expand to fill the space). We can often learn significantly more about controlling our expenses by looking at those with less than us. Those who peddle Abundance may miss the wealth creation skills of those who defeat Scarcity every day.

Be careful your expenses don't ratchet up

Dancing with Algorithms

We spend a lot of time trying to earn our place in the room. The idea of meritocracy is that inequality is acceptable because some people are fundamentally better than other people. Respect, status, and how people view us are such important drivers, people would often do worse in absolute terms, as long as they are doing better than those that surround them. One of my glass half full hopes for Artificial Intelligence is that AI plus *anyone* will be smarter and more effective in traditional 'meritocratic' ways than *anyone* by themselves. Imagine everyone had a very personalised AI coach/assistant with the primary goal to empower them, without disempowering anybody else. That is in equal parts very scary, and very exciting. The whole way we look at the world in terms of what drives us would be challenged. It would no longer be about being better than anybody else as better would lose its meaning. AI would provide the Algorithms. The steps we need to take. We would do the dancing, add the emotion, and create the meaning.