The Illusion of Infinite Abundance
We’ve all heard the paradox. You wake up in the morning and walk towards your bathroom — when a mathematical phenomenon happens along the way:
In order for you to get to your bathroom you first must travel half the distance between your bed and your bathroom.
Okay. You set out to travel that half distance.
But wait! Before you travel half the distance between your bed and your bathroom, you realize you must first travel half the distance between your bed and that midpoint.
You readjust your expectations.
But before you travel half the distance between your bed and that midpoint…
You quickly realize you’ll never get to your bathroom.
In theory, math can always find a smaller distance you must travel before you reach your destination — suggesting that the distance between your bed and your bathroom is infinite. Which is bad news for full bladders.
But we know that in practice the distance between you and the bathroom is finite. You will eventually reach your bathroom. Your life will continue.
It’s this simple observation that proves that everything around us — the molecules and atoms and matter — are all built up from a single unit of measurement. A yet undiscovered “God Particle” that makes our physical world scarce and finite.
Without the existence of this unit, distance would be infinite and shape would be meaningless: we would never get anywhere.
This “God Particle” is the simplest unit of scarcity. It gives our world meaning, providing shape to nature and time, giving form to everything around us. Our world can’t exist without it.
But it’s this very scarcity that modern thinking has attempted to do away with.
Imagine a world where once you set out on your journey to the bathroom you never actually reached the bathroom. You were constantly traveling shorter and shorter distances to get to that elusive “midpoint”. In this world, your life loses all meaning.
“First world living” has obfuscated away our basic understanding of the finiteness of the world around us. The modern city-dweller or suburbanite lives in a world with seemingly infinite access to water, food, energy, fiscal stimulus, mates, entertainment… the list goes on.
Our illusion of abundance has lead to extreme environmental desecration, lack of culture, and a general malaise that keeps many able-bodied people completely out of the workforce.
Our belief in the future abundance of cheap, unlimited oil has caused cities and towns across the world to evolve into a suburban sprawl: lifeless mega stores connected by thousands of miles of asphalt that we traverse by operating oil-fueled machines. This way of life is solely enabled by cheap and abundant oil, and when that oil runs out, cities will need to shrink dramatically.
The illusion of abundance of food in the first world has led to a population that is less healthy than any society in history. The rates of obesity across the first world are appalling — and have gotten so bad that cultural movements have risen up to quiet anyone who speaks out against the overweight. In these groups, “fat shaming” is on par with racism.
A system that has removed the taboos around exclusivity in dating and sex has created a hookup culture in our high schools and colleges and a culture of divorce for those who get out. Dating apps, social media, and limitless access to porn have commoditized the dating scene. The result has eroded trust between the sexes. Many men are left single and sexually frustrated — exiting the dating pool entirely, while females are forced to be far more promiscuous to catch the attention of the remaining men. The end result: a culture of endless dating and hooking up; the death of the nuclear family.
Endless entertainment warps our sense of time — feeding our brain endorphins that it comes to depend on. Boredom, a very common (and helpful) ailment for centuries, has been cured.
An overabundance of products and gadgets has us constantly looking to buy the “new shiny thing” instead of maintaining our “old stuff”.
Water is seemingly abundant. Turn on the faucet or the shower or the tap and your water problems are solved. It doesn’t matter that we don’t know where the water comes from, or how to get it if the water stops running — only that it’s available in the moment we need it. The result: we’ve built entire cities of hundreds of thousands of people in deserts that are completely unable to sustain them (see: Saudi Arabia and Las Vegas).
I could continue, but I think I’ve made my point.
In all of these cases, society is under the illusion that the resources around them are infinite. Need more oil? Go to a gas station. Hungry? Head to the store. Going through a break up? Download this app. Bored? Buy something new.
The illusion of abundance has us walking towards an infinitely far away bathroom one half distance at a time. These finite resources have lost all their meaning.
But the “God particle” will reinstate itself. The reality of scarcity will return.
When it does there will be much hardship as we awake from this wretched illusion. But once the malaise clears our culture will strengthen. The world will return to form.
We will all finally have a destination.
