Investing in the Transition to Abundance
Here is a question I can’t shake, and I’ve never seen it answered honestly: What does investing even mean if abundance is actually coming?
Because investing, when you strip it down, has always been a scarcity behavior. You defer something now — a dinner, a trip, a purchase — to have more of it later. You do this because resources are finite, the future is uncertain, and saving is how a careful person buys a little protection against both. Every retirement account ever opened rests on that quiet assumption: there might not be enough, so I’d better store some up. Investing is scarcity’s most disciplined ritual.
But the worldview I hold — the one Ray Kurzweil and Peter Diamandis spent careers arguing, and that I’ve believed since I sketched an “Auto Abundance Accelerator” back in 2014 — says the long arc bends the other way. Intelligence is getting cheaper. Energy is bending toward cheaper. The cost of making, knowing, and solving is falling on an exponential curve. If that trajectory holds, then the deep premise under all investing — finite resources, store up against the lack — starts to soften.
So what happens to the ritual when its reason begins to dissolve?
Educational and reflective, not financial advice. This is one person thinking out loud about a hard question — not a recommendation to buy, sell, hold, or change anything. Your situation is yours alone. Before you move real money, talk to a fiduciary who knows your numbers.
The honest tension: abundance is a trajectory, not an arrival
Let me say the dangerous part plainly, because abundance optimism curdles fast into foolishness.
Abundance is not here. It is not evenly distributed. And the gap is the whole problem.
Even if technology trends toward plenty, the transition is uneven and slow in places that matter. The curve is real in a server farm and invisible in a single mother’s grocery budget. Cheaper intelligence does not pay this month’s rent. The distance between abundance exists somewhere and abundance reaches the most vulnerable is not a footnote — it is the entire moral and practical challenge of the era we’re standing in.
Which means investing-as-prudence still matters, urgently, right now. The abundance dream is not a permission slip for recklessness. “It’s all going to be free eventually” is a beautiful sentence and a terrible reason to bet the farm, skip the emergency fund, or pour the rent money into a moonshot. You do not get to spend a future that hasn’t arrived. The careful, unglamorous discipline — own broadly, keep costs low, hold for decades, don’t let greed or fear decide — is exactly how a sane person survives the transition long enough to see the other side. Prudence isn’t the opposite of abundance thinking. During an uneven transition, it’s the price of admission.
So hold both. The arc bends toward more. The road there is bumpy, long, and cruel to the unprepared. Both true. Don’t let either one talk you out of the other.
The reframe: from hoarding against scarcity to building toward abundance
But if you only hold prudence, you’ve missed the shift. Because if the premise really is changing, then the meaning of investing can change with it.
The old frame: accumulate to protect yourself against scarcity. Pile up a wall against the lack.
The transition frame: deploy capital to accelerate the abundance and help it reach everyone.
That’s a different verb. Not hoard — participate. Investing stops being only a private defense and becomes, partly, an act of building the world you say is coming. You can put capital toward the things that compound abundance for other people: energy that gets cheaper, tools that put capability in more hands, the people and missions actively pulling the future forward and outward. The most important question stops being how do I protect my pile? and becomes am I helping close the gap between where abundance exists and where it’s desperately needed?
This is stewardship pointed outward. Generosity isn’t the thing you do after investing succeeds — in an abundance transition, generosity and investment start to rhyme. Putting resources into a person’s capability, into a mission that distributes plenty rather than concentrating it, is investing in the truest sense: deferring your own consumption to grow something that pays out for everyone. The future is not a fixed pie to be grabbed before others get there. It’s something being built — and you can pick up a hammer.
The deepest reframe: what stays scarce
Now go all the way down, because this is where the question finally gives up its real answer.
Suppose it works. Suppose material scarcity genuinely eases — intelligence near-free, energy abundant, goods cheap. What’s left scarce?
The non-material. Time. Attention. Meaning. Trust. Wisdom. Purpose. Love. Faith. None of these fall on a cost curve. No model makes your hours more numerous or your relationships automatically deep. If anything, a world drowning in cheap everything makes the un-cheap things more precious, not less — when abundance is the air you breathe, the only remaining scarcity is knowing what it’s for.
So here is the answer to the whole question. In an abundant era, the highest form of investing migrates from the material to the immaterial. The scarcest, highest-return asset becomes who you are becoming, and who you’re becoming it with. Investing in your character, your relationships, your purpose, your faith, your wisdom — that’s the portfolio that still compounds when the financial one has done its job. Money was always the doorway, never the destination. Abundance just makes the doorway easier to walk through and the destination harder to ignore.
This is why I can’t separate any of this from purpose. Material abundance is not the goal; it’s the condition that finally lets the real goal come into focus — a life of meaning, lived in service, anchored in something larger than the balance sheet. The point of solving scarcity was never to have more stuff. It was to free people to ask better questions about why they’re here.
So what do you actually do?
Philosophy that floats is worthless. Land it. Four moves for living and investing through the transition:
- Stay prudent through the uneven road. Don’t bet the farm on utopia arriving on schedule. Emergency fund, low-cost diversified core, long horizon, no FOMO. You can’t spend a future that hasn’t landed — survive to see it.
- Deploy some capital toward accelerating and distributing abundance. Not just your own portfolio — into people, capability, and missions that compound plenty for others. Generosity is an investment with a real return; it’s just measured in a different currency.
- Invest increasingly in the non-material scarce goods. Time, relationships, purpose, faith, wisdom. As the material gets cheaper, these get more valuable. Budget your hours and attention as deliberately as your dollars — they’re the assets that won’t be commoditized.
- Hold the long view: build for the abundant future while serving real people in the scarce present. First the fish, then the theory of oceans. Feed someone today; build the system that feeds everyone tomorrow. Don’t let the grand vision excuse you from the small, immediate good.
The takeaway you can act on this week: pick one material allocation and one non-material allocation. Keep funding your disciplined, prudent core like the transition might take your whole life — because it might. And invest one deliberate unit of time, money, or attention into something that compounds abundance beyond yourself — a person, a purpose, a relationship, a gift. One seatbelt, one open hand.
Because investing, in the end, was never really about defending against scarcity. It was always about faith that the future is worth preparing for — and stewardship of the gap between here and there. Abundance doesn’t retire that faith. It finally tells us what it was for.
Educational and reflective, not financial advice. Do your own diligence and consult a fiduciary before making investment decisions. The “abundance” thesis referenced (Diamandis, Kurzweil) is a long-run trajectory, not a guarantee — and it is unevenly distributed. Plan for the present you actually live in.