Abundance

“Ooooh,” I groaned, tilting my head slightly and letting my voice rise just a touch at the end of the sentence. “Your joints must be telling you something?”

I was deliberately using what’s known in NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) and Ericksonian Hypnotic language as a selectional restriction violation. Her joints couldn’t actually talk to her, obviously. But maybe if I phrased it that way, she’d think a bit harder about what her body was trying to communicate. Maybe she’d come up with the answer herself instead of waiting for me to say the words she didn’t want to hear.

You see, I’d learned over the years that if you can get someone to discover the truth on their own, they’re far more likely to actually do something about it. Tell them directly and you hit resistance. Let them figure it out and suddenly it’s their idea.

Unfortunately, the walls (if they had ears) would’ve heard nothing but the silence of her puzzled expression.

I’m not writing this about persuasive language. This is about abundance. A large proportion of my patients are living with obesity, and a meaningful number more with diabetes or pre-diabetes. This particular patient was, in effect, eating her way into serious health problems, and she was doing it in a world that makes it ridiculously easy to do exactly that.

Here’s the thing that nobody wants to talk about. Despite modern medicine, despite the internet, despite good sanitation, running water, electricity, education, and a society that provides almost all of our population’s basic needs, some researchers think life expectancy in parts of the world may start going backwards for the first time in generations. The biggest health crisis facing most of the world today isn’t war or famine or plague. It’s the swelling girth of the population. And the reason behind this obesity epidemic is brutally simple.

Abundance.

Abundance is having everything you need and then some. It’s the opposite of scarcity, which is having less than what you need. Your body (and your mind) evolved to handle scarcity. Surviving harsh times, rationing food, storing every calorie possible because you never knew when the next meal was coming. That’s what you’re genetically, physically, and mentally designed for. Unfortunately, you’re not designed for abundance at all.

Scarcity gives you challenge. It gives you harsh conditions and the learning that comes from enduring hardship. Scarcity gives you innovation, continuous evolution, and new solutions to problems. When you lose scarcity, you lose the stoic resolve you typically see in older generations. You lose resilience. You lose the ability to keep going through life’s trials and tribulations.

With abundance, you’re developing a soft society. Now your kids are wrapped in cotton wool. Competitiveness is frowned upon at schools. Fairness has been taken so far in some organizations that it actually starts to undermine meritocracy itself. Add all these problems together and you can see why society pushes you towards the entitlement bias mindset we’re about to look at next.

You live in a culture of getting what you want simply because you feel you deserve it, rather than because you’ve actually worked for it. And you’re also becoming sick from having too much of what you really don’t need in your life.

There’s even a condition called affluenza that refers to people driven by materialism and superficial values. It creates feelings of anxiety, depression, low self-esteem, worthlessness, and a sense of unfulfillment in the world around them, even when they have enough. Whether it’s affluenza or just a product of abundance, there seems to be a general dissatisfaction spreading through society. There’s a lack of gratitude for what people actually have. There’s always a want for more. Some people are never happy with their lot in life, and their focus is entirely on what they don’t have instead of what they’ve already got.

I believe you’re at a turning point where the combined effects of entitlement, abundance, affluenza, and the endless want for more (even when you already have enough) has caused an obesity in society at so many levels. You have a throwaway culture. A fast food generation always looking for instant cures and quick fixes to problems. Too much emphasis on status, money, possessions, and appearance.

Agriculture produces more than enough food to feed the world’s entire population. The challenge isn’t production anymore. It’s distribution. How do you get excess food to those who actually need it? And for the privileged who have enough, how do they learn to live with all that excess around them without destroying themselves?

The question is this. Can you free yourself from the shackles of entitlement? Can you take the hard road instead and do without some of the things you don’t actually need?

Your generation’s longevity is based on the choices and life decisions you make more than ever before. The lifestyle you lead depends on you continuing to make the right decisions every single day. With abundance comes excess. There’s always the temptation to fill your life with the wrong things. But here’s what people forget. Today you also have an abundance of good things. You have choice. A choice to learn. A choice to read. A choice to make the changes you need to make. For most of you, that means a choice to do something different rather than constantly looking for easy options and instant gratification.

There are paths you can take in life that lead to health, wealth, happiness, and wellbeing. That path might be slightly harder than the one leading to the all-you-can-eat buffet of easy options. But it’s there.

I’m seeing the prevalence of type 2 diabetes increasing to the point where more and more people need increasing numbers of medications just to prevent the many complications of this disease. For some people, the toll of excess carbohydrate has already burned out their pancreas to the point where they can only survive with daily injections or medication.

Physically, you’re not designed for abundance. You’re designed for scarcity. Your body hangs onto every single calorie you eat. Additionally, the softening of your mental conditioning means you find it far too tempting to choose the easy path. You shy away from challenges and hardship. As long as health and social care exists, you can expect to get everything you need in future years. But the safety net now has big holes in it, and those holes are only getting bigger. Healthcare costs are becoming unsustainable.

Abundance also means there’s an abundance of information and knowledge. With that (plus good quality basic education), the excuse that there’s always someone else to blame for your predicament starts to become thinner and thinner. You also have more choice than ever before. But with choice comes responsibility.

If this age of abundance lasts (and that’s a big if, given potential world wars, natural disasters, overpopulation, and the need for a technological solution to provide cheap non-fossil fuel energy pretty damn soon), society as a whole will need to learn how to live with excess, choice, and responsibility.

When scarcity doesn’t drive you to work, what does? The reality of getting up on a cold winter morning to earn minimum wage is in stark contrast to sitting on the sofa watching daytime TV. Sometimes in life you need to make the hard choices. But the hard choices are becoming harder to make because society is making you softer. You’re at risk of being a generation that’s losing purpose. One that’s lost a reason to push further or try harder because you already have enough of what you really need.

Some of what follows in this hub is going to be hard-hitting for some. I believe in free choice. I believe that if you have the basic ability to read this, you also have the ability to make better choices in your life.

I’m not going to give you sugar-coated excuses for why you can’t do something. I’m not going to help you make excuses either. I’m just going to give you some insight into how you can clear your thinking, get rid of the things holding you back, and make some better choices for yourself in life.

So let’s get back to that patient. Am I wrong to connect her weight to the pain in her knees? Maybe the consultation could’ve gone better if I’d found a gentler way to raise it. Weight is a genuinely difficult thing to discuss with a patient, and it’s easy to get the tone wrong even with the best intentions.

On the surface, this lady just needs to make some different choices in her life. She needs to lose some weight. Simple, right?

The problem, however, is never that simple. There’s always a deeper reason. There are many reasons why people won’t do what they need to do. This hub will help you look below the surface at some of those reasons.

You now live in a society where you have choice. Because of this, you can choose to change the life you lead. For most people, all you have to do is make the effort to do so.

The question is, will you?

Further reading

Secondary Gain

Pro-innovation and Triviality Bias

Information Bias

Glass Half Empty?

The Law of Diminishing Returns

Back to Basics, and Don’t Overthink It

Further reading

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