I love opulence and I love abundance. I over-order food, have multiple colors of the same shirt and I like it when things are expensive (unfortunately the expensive part isn’t as fun when my budgeting app sends me notifications). I like extra-ordinarily tall ceilings. I like signing up for more courses than I could possibly do. I like taking on more than I can manage. I love open grass fields. I love the idea of owning multiple houses. I like it when there is redundancy and I like it when there is a lot left over.
Abundance makes me feel powerful. When I order something on amazon and it arrives at my doorstep, I feel like I’ve made progress, like I’m in control of the narrative of my life. Maybe not for everything, like protein shakes or detergent - but I definitely felt that when I was binge ordering home decor in the pandemic. Every order made me better than I was yesterday. I felt like I was in control of a rocketship that could never crash.
But despite all the improvements to my life, it didn’t fulfill me. (Objects are not fulfilling, true joy is in experiences, appearances are shallow anyways etc etc etc. - yes I know). For the longest time, I felt that it was because I was unhappy at my core, maybe I was depressed, maybe I was lonely, maybe I was looking for something that was never there. Maybe the validation from being good and the best can only do so much.
I mistook abundance for something I really wanted - Agency. I was hoping it would fill the void that my lack of agency left.
When you’re trapped in the house and cannot do much to make progress in life, even the slightest nudge feels like a push in the right direction. And even if you’re not trapped, acquiring abundance gives you a taste of what it would be like to exercise agency. Abundance is a shortcut to experiencing the same reward as exercising agency, just much smaller reward. Call it a shot of power.
But getting better at believing you have agency takes much more time and work than buying a new jacket or a new chair. Once you feel the high from acquiring things, it is hard to be patient and build that agency. The act of making yourself better through abundance is almost like a drug.
However, once you start doing small things to build your sense of agency, you will get addicted to that too. You love doing small activities that are different but not different enough that it’d disrupt your daily life - like taking a different way home. You do enough of these and you start feeling 1000X better about yourself. For me, practicing it made me feel more secure. It made me less anxious about who I was and where I was headed. It also made me feel like I didn’t need a lot of things. I still love opulence and abundance, but it isn’t necessarily because it makes me feel better.
I just like it because it’s nice and it lets me express myself.
Here is the tweet that made me reflect on my relationship with agency:
https://twitter.com/Coscorrodrift/status/1653874386770722816?s=20
Amazing <3 now I’m thinking deeper about all the extravagant shopping I did the past few months, when all I needed was agency! This is revolutionary
"I mistook abundance for something I really wanted - agency"
MY GOD LADY that hit hard! Thank you - and I'm glad you're back to writing :)
<3 Emily