No one complains about having enough. Enough food, enough money, enough security; these are the markers of a good life. But what happens when “enough” turns into too much? When abundance, instead of liberating us, traps us?
We don’t often think of excess as a burden. If anything, modern consumer culture teaches us that more is always better. More choices, more products, more opportunities. The economy thrives on this logic, turning every aisle, every webpage, every moment into a marketplace. But abundance, when pushed to its extreme, doesn’t always mean freedom. It can just as easily lead to paralysis.
Psychologists call it the “paradox of choice.” The more options we have, the harder it is to decide. A grocery store with 300 different kinds of cereal feels overwhelming rather than empowering. A streaming service with an endless library of films makes it impossible to pick one. Faced with so many possibilities, we freeze, hesitate, scroll endlessly, abandon decisions altogether. Or, worse, we choose everything. We pile up objects, subscriptions, commitments, convinced that if we just acquire enough, we will finally feel satisfied.
Of course, satisfaction never comes. That’s the trick of hyper-abundance. It doesn’t fill a need; it creates more of them. The logic of the modern economy depends on this: the more overwhelmed we are, the more we consume. And so we accumulate (clothes we don’t wear, gadgets we don’t use, food that goes bad in our refrigerators) because we’ve been conditioned to believe that acquiring is an end in itself.
But there’s another kind of abundance, one that isn’t about accumulation but about enoughness. A well-stocked kitchen where every ingredient has a purpose. A bookshelf where every title means something. A life where there is room to breathe, space to think, and where the absence of excess makes room for the things that truly matter.
The real question isn’t whether abundance is good or bad; it’s about balance. Enough comfort without indulgence. Enough security without hoarding. Enough choices without exhaustion. Because a life of too little is a struggle. But a life of too much? That can be its own kind of poverty.
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