Scarcity Vs Abundance
The Traveling Medicine
“Becoming aware of the possibility against the background of reality or, to becoming aware of what can be done about a given situation.” Viktor Frankel (Man’s Search For Meaning)
Scarcity Mindset
There is an assumption of scarcity that stems from living in one place for a long period of time. It’s impossible to avoid hearing phrases like these:
- “The job market sucks right now…”
- “I just can’t meet new friends in this city…”
- “There are no attractive/great partners in this city/country…”
Even if we’re remotely aware that our reality can be different in other places, the majority of us would never dare to move to or explore other places.
Recently I took a Spanish course with a few students, spending the week living and learning with the students. One of the students there was a girl from America that spent the entire week drawing pictures. I asked her one day if she wanted to be an artist or learn drawing, she replied with a planned answer: “there are no jobs in it…”.
After that quick exchange, I thought to myself: “it’s incredible how conditioned we are to assume scarcity”. She hasn’t even tried a single day in that market space and she assumes there will never be a job in it. To the point of this article: If you can’t find a job in the field you’re passionate about… move to another place :)
Somewhere in the world, you will find a way to make a living from your passions. There are 8 billion humans on this earth… I’m pretty sure some are interested in art and drawing and will be potential clients. There are endless cities and places that are more conducive to that career path than that particular city in America.
Scarcity runs deep in our programming, and it’s prevalent in every conversation that refers to life choices: “there are no good women/men in this city… it’s impossible to find a good partner or a good group of friends… people are so cold in this city…”
We’re programmed to stop the inquiry of our happiness in our own city.
We’re born in one place, it’s not a death sentence.
Abundance Mindset
If you travel for long enough, you’ll find it hard to hold concepts of scarcity in your mind. There are endless places/people/jobs in this world. When I was looking for a volunteering job in South America, I looked at more than 5 countries that could potentially be good for the type of work I wanted to experiment with. Whatever your field is, the world is abundant with opportunities, if you have the courage to look elsewhere than your local pond.
If you’re sitting by the “fire” of your city, as I did for all my life in Israel, wondering where the fuck are the other tribe mates??… Travel!
Living in Tel Aviv Israel for the last 15 years of my life has given birth to a few great friends… about 5–7 friends that I call my “oldest and closest friends”. However, going into our twenties has challenged every single one of those friendships, to the point where sometimes I had weeks and months with barely seeing any friend. At some point, I became so frustrated by the “scene” in my city, that I just gave up on trying to find people I can connect with, not to mention date… Although the city is known for being a “party city”, it’s not for me, and I don’t relate to most of the social structure there.
Traveling has reshuffled the cards in my brain and introduced me to hundreds of people over the course of this year. I’ve collected dozens of new friends and made a lot of meaningful connections all over the world. Every time I made another significant connection, I had to observe the fact that the world is filled with great people.
They’re not walking the streets by the thousands, but statistically speaking, if you have around 5–7 great friends in your city, you can probably extract 5–7 meaningful connections in most of the cities around the world. You travel to enough places, and experiment for a few months/years, you’ll build your tribe at some point. I found out that there is no shortage of anything, definitely no shortage of humans!
Just go to any subway station at any metropolis in the world, and you’ll see humans jammed like sardines, fighting for an inch of space.
There are great people to connect with, endless people to meet and learn from, endless people to date, endless places where you can start over. Forming a tribe, a career, a dating life… are not things that should be restricted to one place. You restrict your options, and you will end up saying things like: “I wish my city had that…. (insert whatever nonsense)”.
I always assume abundance now, if not where I’m currently in, then where I’ll be in a few weeks/months from now. I’m not letting any facet of my life degenerate to a point where I have to call a detective to find out what the fuck happened in that aspect of my life.
No place is a death sentence, only a scarcity mindset is the root of the problem. There is no scarcity of time, we have time, too much time!
If we all had 1 year to live, I assume 97% of us would travel nonstop.
No scarcity of time or money (for the majority of the western world…), the real sacristy is in our thinking. We can be rich as hell in our bank account, but still, have no surplus in our courage to change our life for the better.
“It’s about creating something doable and stretching it from there.” Larid Hamilton (The School Of Greatness Podcast)
If you told me a year ago that I’ll quit my business and life in Israel and go travel the world, I would think you’re nuts. The capacity to change is cultivated by doable steps and stretching it from there.
I spent 11 weeks in Europe with a backpack and built my initial base for coping with changes. I Went back to Israel and decided I wanted to change everything, bought a ticket to Canada and in 6 weeks wrapped my life in Israel. After another 7 months in America now, I can look at the next few years of my life with one certainty: “I’m not going to waste any more time living in a place that’s not facilitating happiness for me”.
Here are some of my favorite candidates for relocating from the last year:
Santiago (Chile), Lisbon (Portugal), Granada (Spain), San Sebastian (Spain), Zurich (Switzerland), Budapest (Hungary), Halifax (Canada), and Austin! (Texas).
Each of these places is worthy of 3–12 months of exploring (at least).
Abundance has to be experienced to be believed and comprehended. If you spend your whole life in a dessert, your mind will know only that reality and project that to the future like a mental prison sentence.
You explore enough, and soon you realize that the world is rich enough to meet your needs. We just need to be brave enough, to start the first doable step we can think of in the direction of our desires. Traveling is not a magic solution, but it’s the most effective medicine I know to combat a scarcity mindset. If the phrase: “I just didn’t/don’t have the opportunity to travel” is familiar to you, here’s the only truth about traveling: There is no traveling Santa Claus, the responsibility to create the opportunity to travel is on you.
I built a hole for myself in Israel for years, and every year I was getting less flexible in my capacity to change. Until one day I took a step in the other direction and started digging the way out.
There is always a way out.
If you’re in a similar situation to where I was, take the nearest shovel and start digging in the opposite direction :)
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If you didn’t like this post and you love your city/country: this is clearly not an article for you, and you just wasted 7 minutes of your life according to medium’s algorithm for calculating reading speed. I’ll extend a piece offering: Tell me about your awesome city and I’ll travel there and buy you lunch one day.
*This offer is limited to the first 5 people, due to monetary concerns :)
