On a daily basis, most of us don’t feel abundant. Most of us spend our days focusing on what we don’t have, rather than appreciating what we do have. Every society and culture varies in how this manifests itself. I’ll generally be referencing the culture I know best, American, but I hope this resonates outside of my bubble.

Plato used allegories to illustrate some of his ideas. One of my favorites is the allegory of the cave. If you aren’t familiar with the allegory, the Wikipedia page on it has a nice breakdown. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_cave

Most of us relate to the world, and our place in it, relatively. We decide what we want based on what we see other people doing, or what we see other people owning. Advertising connects products with audiences, and tries to create needs where there are no existing needs. If we need something we feel an acute sense of lack. If we want something we won’t necessarily feel lack, but we also won’t feel abundant. How does this tie into Plato? What we see is carefully created in order to influence us. But we all know that, and knowing that those are shadows on a wall and not reality doesn’t help us to understand what’s real. When we’re limited to the shadows on the wall, we begin to discount everything as illusion and become cynical. Have you ever met a cynic that felt their life was overflowing with abundance? I haven’t.

Fred R. Barnard is credited with saying “a picture is worth a thousand words”. Images have become the standard in advertising because they can communicate in seconds words targeted at the viewer. But we all know this as well. What we forget is that it works, even when we’re aware of it. If our lives are filled with images of people who resemble us, or that we aspire to be, who are always smiling, always vacationing, always in the sun, always healthy, and always surrounded by items viewed as markers of success, it will have an effect on us. Images are not a reflection of reality. At best, they’re aspirational. At worst, they’re meant to cause harm. Creating a sense of lack, or fear, is the goal behind all of this imagery and that’s most likely what it will do. Once that lack feeling is created they will then gladly sell us many things and goals that might make us happy. How do we even know what makes us happy?

This is where I say one of the modern phrases that I usually hate: Do your own research.

We’re the only person that knows what we need, what we want, and what we have in abundance. But that’s one of the hardest things to determine. We are constantly being shown what we should want, what we should need, and what abundance looks like. That is someone else’s abundance. Start the easy way, if we can, by culling all the stuff that we know doesn’t feel good to us. Maybe we do want a big house. Maybe we do need a new car. There might be a satisfying abundance in baking our own bread (one of my abundances). Then again, we might not want to wear a Rolex, or diamonds. Golf just may not be out thing, but Kegeln might satisfy. It can take time, give it all the time it needs.