Maybe somebody could give me an abundance mindset as a belated 60th birthday present?

There’s a lot I like about the general idea of the abundance mindset. It offers hope and motivation at a time when those can be in awfully short suppl—

(—dammit. Just slipped into a scarcity mindset there.)

It can help to refocus desire, encouraging us to see a kind of inner abundance of the things that matter most, and a profound connection to the world around us that can encourage us to try to make it better for everyone. That kind of mindset, I can get behind.

But I often hear the term used in a less helpful, far more materialistic way, though — when those who have plenty of resources and power use it to explain why others don’t. If only the poor would adopt an abundance mindset, why, they too could have the big cars and private jets and giant houses and private monitor lizard zoos.

That breed of abundance mindset is a kind of secular sibling to the prosperity gospel espoused by some Christian sects (which as I understand it teaches that a sufficiently wealthy camel can pass through the eye of a needle) and the woo-woo utter bullshit concept dubbed “The Law of Attraction.”

And given the remarkable concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands in recent decades, the wealthy should probably hope that the 99% don’t adopt that more materialistic take on the abundance mindset. If they come to believe that yes, there are enough resources out there in the world to allow everyone to achieve their desires, they might just go looking where they’re most likely to find them.