Scarcity and abundance
From the book by Andrey Sokolov "Scarcity and abundance".
Scarcity and abundance
We all strive for happiness. Everyone has their own concept of what happiness is. Moreover, in the process of life for each person, the concept of what is happiness changes.
After all, what makes a one-year-old child happy is unlikely to be happiness for an eighth grader.
This means happiness, like many other things in our life, is "relative".
And if you follow the analogy with good and evil, then happiness is the absence of grief. After all, if a person experiences happiness, then he does not grieve. And if a person is grieving, then he is unhappy.
It's like with warmth and cold, light and darkness, hunger and satiety, bad grades and good, poverty and wealth.
And all this can be expressed in a general concept - scarcity and abundance.
If a person is cold, then he is experiencing a heat deficit. If a person is sad, then he has a deficit of happiness.
This understanding gives us a tool to manage our lives - the scarcity and abundance technique.
With the concepts of "scarcity" and "abundance" people are found everywhere.
A deficiency is a lack of something.
Hunger is a lack of food.
Illness is a health deficit.
Stupidity, ignorance - lack of knowledge.
Poverty is a lack of money.
Loneliness is a lack of communication.
Longing is a lack of happiness.
Boredom - a lack of entertainment, a lack of things, activities.
Fear is a security deficit.
A hungry person experiences a shortage of food, a poor person a shortage of money.
Abundance can also be found in everyday life.
When a person is full, when he no longer wants to eat, when he is full of satiety. When there is an abundance of food.
In case of abundance, the required category, thing or resource is in the required quantity and even with a margin. With an abundance of something, a person ceases to feel an acute need for additional receipt of this resource.
Actually, reading this book reduces the lack of knowledge and skills. And, as you can see, by reducing the knowledge gap, you can reduce the scarcity of relationships, security, etc.
And reducing scarcity is the first step to abundance.
Visually, scarcity and abundance can be plotted on a graph with “Abundance” to the right of zero on the X-axis and “Scarcity” to the left.
On the Y axis, you can place any priorities that are important for a particular person: activity, money, health, love, communication, academic performance, etc.
It is important to understand that the concept of deficit can be objective, but more often subjective.
For example, someone thinks that a temperature of minus 10 degrees is cold, but for someone even minus 20 is quite comfortable.
It follows from this that an abundance of cold is a deficit of heat. Therefore, it is more reasonable to indicate positive characteristics of types on the graph. For example, write Health, not Illness. Otherwise, confusion will result - Abundance of disease is a Deficiency of health. We strive for an abundance of health, not an abundance of disease. Therefore, on the Y-axis we indicate the category that we want to get in abundance.
What is it for?
By dividing your life into such components, into categories, you can understand where more efforts should be made to achieve general comfort and satisfaction.
In addition, since the feeling of scarcity and abundance is subjective, it is important to understand for yourself where there is a real deficit and where is imaginary.
After all, if a car is needed for movement, then only its spaciousness and reliability are important. And the cost of such a machine may not be great. This means that there will be no shortage of money when buying it. Or it won't be big. And if the task of acquiring a car is status in the eyes of others, then the lack of money can be felt constantly. And it may well be wiser to look at a car as a function and use it as a function. Ride function. Not as a function of a gold bar on wheels.
Even a rich person, from the point of view of someone, a person can feel poor and earnestly increase his wealth. And at the same time, a person who does not have a lot of money may not feel a deficit. It all depends on the starting point and the intelligibility of the landmarks.
It follows from this that the concepts of scarcity and abundance are subjective categories.
Someone, experiencing a slight malaise, feels a huge health deficit.
And at the same time, a person with bruises and bruises can consider himself perfectly healthy and happy.
It also follows that the concept of scarcity and abundance are interrelated and are located on the same coordinate axis. Those. to the left of zero on the X-axis is a state or feeling of scarcity, and to the right is abundance.
Why is all this important?
This allows you to get a measurement method, similar to a ruler or scales, which can measure your condition and correct deficient values. On your own. Not trusting someone else's opinion.
Indeed, very often, under the influence of advertising, habits, attitudes and customs, other information noise or familiar clichés, it seems to us that we are sorely lacking something. But is it really so? And what is needed in reality? A new gadget, a chocolate bar, a can of soda ... or a smile from a parent, friend, teacher?
How to use the concept of scarcity and abundance in your life? How these concepts and frame of reference can help a person live a more comfortable life? And maybe happy.
Is abundance even theoretically possible? Sure.
Could there be harm to a person if he does not experience a deficit? Can not. However, this is an idle question - some deficits come back to life all the time - otherwise we would not eat and sleep.
Abundance is not comfort, not harmony. This satisfaction is closer to happiness.
Hard training or work may not bring comfort or harmony - muscles ache, there is fatigue, but there is also satisfaction.
All deficiency states violate harmony and do not bring pleasure. While the absence of scarcity, and even more so the state of abundance, increases the amount of life satisfaction and the amount of happiness.
A person, lacking sleep and rest, may get sick, his performance will be reduced and he is unlikely to be happy about it.
Using the concepts of scarcity and abundance can help a person manage their life.
After all, it is on these concepts that the management of a person from the outside is built.
Scarcity and abundance are used both in the marketing of goods and in the manipulation of people by the state. But more on that later.
Let's deal with ourselves first. We will receive a tool for managing our lives and only then will we learn to resist manipulations from the outside on the basis of it.
In the process of life, a person receives many signals and landmarks. Sometimes false.
As a result, he begins to get confused and jump from one extreme to another. Strive for false goals.
(It is important to understand that these goals may be false for one, but true for another.)
A person can not only be misled by someone, but also be deluded himself.
However, using the concepts of scarcity and abundance can greatly simplify decision-making and setting both long-term and short-term benchmarks.
A trivial example. If a person is tired, then he lacks, a deficit of rest and sleep. And all that is needed is to notice this and adjust your life to eliminate this deficit. Relax, sleep.
A similar rule applies to all other categories.
If a person has a health deficit, i.e. is corny sick, then he needs to direct his forces to recovery, and not to study or sports.
Thus, control is reduced to the banal construction of a schedule and its monitoring in order to transfer any deficit state to an abundant one.
And, of course, we remember that the only criterion for scarcity or abundance in this case is a person's own feeling.
In this regard, it is useful to look at a category such as money. Those. poverty and wealth.
It is possible that you have met people with much greater material opportunities than yours, but at the same time they do not feel either rich or even wealthy.
And at the same time, most likely, you have seen people who do not have much money, but who feel quite wealthy.
Why is this happening?
You can consider this on the example of phones.
The spread in the cost of phones in stores reaches two orders of magnitude. Those. one phone can be up to 100 times more expensive than another.
But these are all phones. They are only needed to make a call.
And even if we start discussing additional functions, then phones that are completely identical in functions can differ in price by 5-10 times.
However, there are people for whom it is extremely important to have the most expensive phone of the latest model.
It would be naive to think that this category of people will ever feel that they have eliminated their "telephone" deficit and are on the right side of the graph, in the zone of abundance.
Brand and prestige are important to this category. And they are in constant pursuit of the newest. This race will be endless and if it will bring satisfaction, then only for a short moment. Until a new model arrives.
At the same time, having spent a significant part of their money on a new phone, a person will not actually shift the "telephone" component to the right. But the monetary component will shift to the left and may be in a deficit zone.
A person does this in order to shift the concept of "prestige" to the right. But is it possible? And is there a place for the "prestige" category on the chart?
As we said, the concept of scarcity and abundance is subjective. Those. they depend on the assessment of their completeness and significance by the person himself. While the concept of "prestige" is a category of external evaluation.
A prestigious car, prestigious clothing, a prestigious telephone - where does this adjective come from, in relation to any thing or category?
Only from the outside. From advertisements, conversations with other people, rumors, television, etc. Those. this is someone's subjective opinion or manipulation, but not the opinion and feeling of the person himself.
This means that there is no place for the concept of "prestige" either on the chart or in the life of a specific person who wants to manage his life himself.
A person who enjoys his job is not concerned with whether it is prestigious. For he likes her.
At the same time, if a person uses the concept of prestige when choosing a profession, then he may find himself in a situation where work does not bring pleasure, despite the "prestige".