For decades, I have been exploring an essential question: Why do we have so much and yet feel so poor? This question took on a life of its own during my two-year stint working in Indigenous villages in Oaxaca, Mexico. It struck me that the people I was working with seemed a lot happier than many of the people I knew back in the United States. I asked the men and women of the village what wealth meant to them. The themes were consistent. Wealth meant health, community, rituals and celebrations. It meant spirituality and trusting that there was something greater than our human selves to connect to. It meant honoring our elders and embracing the sheer gift of being alive, no matter what hardships we might face. It meant sharing the bounty with fellow villagers, trusting that through your sharing there would be plenty to go around.
The abundance mindset
People have been writing about abundance and money for a hundred years. Books like those of Wallace D. Wattles (The Science of Getting Rich, 1910) and Napoleon Hill (Think and Grow Rich, 1937) went a long way toward creating a popular discourse around the role of abundance in our lives. The term abundance mindset was coined by Stephen R. Covey in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Covey presented this concept to counteract what he called a scarcity mindset. Abundance means having more than what you need. He argued that by adopting an abundance mindset, we would come to accept the notion that there are sufficient resources and opportunities for everyone to succeed.
Yet often this swings too far in the other direction, leading us to grasp at abundance while pushing away scarcity. Together, they create an abundance–scarcity cycle that can have an outsized impact on our lives and detract us from the bigger question of how much is enough.
The consequences of overconsumption
The overuse of external resources is real. If we continue to prioritize strategies that emphasize material growth, our economy will eventually both implode and explode. We see it happening now with climate change, overconsumption and overpopulation. Our world is both heating up and flooding over at the same time. Our external environment mirrors the imbalance within each of us, forcing us to ask: Have we gone too far?
If we consider our current definition of success within the abundance–scarcity cycle, the more assets we have, the wealthier and more successful we are. The more we earn, the higher our net worth. As a society, we buy into the misguided assumption that our intrinsic self-worth is determined by our net worth. Regardless of whether we realize it, we mistakenly think we are trapped in this scarcity cycle. We also believe that money is responsible for either getting us out of or keeping us in this position.
No wonder we all have so much emotion around money and finances. In this world of scarce resources, the only way to have more self-esteem is to get more money. In this scenario, our sense of self becomes tied to the ups and downs of our bank accounts. When we align our need for well-being to the accumulation of material resources alone, we mistakenly believe that our experience of wealth needs to come from an external source. We place money and profit above all else. And here is the funny thing: No amount of abundance of scarce resources can get us out of this mess. An abundance mindset cannot solve the problem of scarcity; they are opposite poles of the same cycle.
The power of enough
If we blindly play the game of accumulating scarce resources, we will never realize the power of enough. If we keep buying into the collective fallacy that our worth as a person is equal to the amount of material resources we have accumulated, we risk conflating money and profit with people and purpose.
I invite you to challenge the modern tale you have been told about money. In taking this step, you might just find that money is more of a companion and a guide, rather than a guardian at the gates of some mythical utopia where everyone is fulfilled because of their bank accounts.
Excerpted from The Power of Enough: Finding Joy in Your Relationship with Money by Elizabeth Husserl (New World Library, 2025).
Photo by In Her Image Photography
