THE DISCOURSE OF ABUNDANCE

You will not feel full when you have more.

You have always known this.

You have never let yourself know it.

The whole arrangement is built on the part of you that refuses to know it.

The work.

The acquisitions.

The next house.

The next job.

The next number that was supposed to do the thing the last number was supposed to do.

The thing it was supposed to do, it never did.

You said the last number was too small.

You picked a bigger one.

You worked.

You arrived.

The ache was waiting for you when you got there, in the same chair, looking bored.

I know this because I have been the one in the chair too.

I am writing this from a place that is not finished with the chair.

I am writing it because the lie that the chair would empty itself if I just kept going has cost me years I am not getting back, and I would like at least one other person to not pay the same price.

Here is what nobody who sells you abundance is going to tell you.

The ache is not about your life.

It has never been about your life.

It will not be about your life when you have everything you think you want, because there is no version of having where the ache stops, because the ache is not measuring what you have.

It is running on its own.

It runs whether you are rich or poor.

It runs whether you are alone or in love.

It runs in monks.

It runs in billionaires.

It runs in the people on the calm magazine covers who sold you the calm.

The ache does not care who you are.

It is doing what it does.

It does that thing whether or not anything in your life is actually wrong.

People who teach abundance are lying to you.

I want to be careful about which part is the lie.

The thing they describe inside you is real.

There is something running in there that produces a feeling of not-enough on a loop.

Real.

They are not making that up.

What they are lying about is the cure.

They are telling you that if you understand it deeply enough or breathe correctly enough or visualize sharply enough, the feeling stops.

It does not stop.

The seeing changes nothing about the feeling.

The feeling was there before you had any words for it.

It will be there after every word in this writing has gone out of your head.

It is older than you.

It is older than language.

It is going to outlast you.

You can spend the rest of your life trying to get it to be quiet.

It will not be quiet.

You will die with it inside you.

That is the situation.

That is the part nobody is going to write on the cover of a book.

This is what they will not say, so I am going to say it.

The actual move is small and it is unflattering and it is not going to look like anything on the internet.

You let the ache fire and you stop believing what it tells you.

That is it.

That is everything I have to offer.

That is what years of sitting with this looked like in the end.

Not silence.

Not enough.

Not the warm feeling people photograph for their landing pages.

The ache fires.

You feel it land in your chest like a hand pressing on a place there is nothing in.

You notice the hand.

You do not interpret the hand.

You do not redesign your life around the hand.

You do not call up your accountant because the hand pressed.

You do not break up with the person you love because the hand pressed.

You do not start a company to make the hand stop.

The hand does not stop when you start a company.

The hand presses harder when you start a company because now you have a company to compare to all the bigger companies you do not have.

The hand is going to press whether you obey it or not.

Almost no one stops obeying it.

I watch them.

I watch friends I love spend decades obeying a hand inside their chest that does not care who they become as long as they keep moving.

I watch them build whole lives out of running from a feeling that was going to follow them anywhere.

I watch them stand at the end of those lives and conclude they did not run fast enough.

The conclusion is generated by the same thing that generated the running.

There is no exit from inside the running.

The running is the cage.

The cage is shaped like a life.

The life looks impressive from the outside.

Sometimes the loop opens.

Not because you opened it.

It opens by itself.

You are washing a glass.

You are walking from one room to another room you have walked to a thousand times.

The part of you that runs the not-enough goes quiet for thirty seconds.

The world is just the world.

The glass is just the glass.

There is no gap between what is here and what should be here, because should-be was never a feature of what was here.

It was a feature of the thing that just went quiet.

You cannot chase that.

The chasing turns it back on.

The wanting of no-want is want.

The hunting of the pause is what kills the pause.

This is the trap.

It is not solvable from the part of you that wants to solve it.

I sit with this.

I do not have a way through it.

What I have is a way of being with it that is different from what the abundance industry sells.

The difference is that I no longer believe the ache when it fires.

The ache fires.

I feel the hand press.

I do not act on the press.

The people who arrive here do not look abundant.

They do not glow.

They do not radiate the bright surplus the people selling abundance photograph for their websites.

They look like people who stopped arguing with a feeling that was never going to lose the argument fairly.

That is all this is.

Not surplus.

Not overflow.

Not enough.

The end of the argument.

The ache keeps firing.

You stop answering it.