abundance mindset

Abundance mindset was built for money and relocated to dating without much renovation. In its original habitat it asked people to believe wealth was plentiful. In the coaching version it asks them to believe romantic prospects are plentiful and to behave accordingly, which mostly means replying slowly.

The doctrine has sensible parts. Desperation reads poorly across a table, and nobody enjoys being treated as a person’s last chance. The trouble is the method. Abundance is taught as a performance to be sustained until it becomes true, so its students spend much of their time acting out a surplus they are still in the process of trying to acquire.

This produces a recognizable set of behaviors. Waiting a measured interval before replying. Mentioning, unprompted, a busy week. Leaving after one drink to signal other commitments, then sitting in the parked car. Running several apps at once and referring to them as a pipeline. The coaches call this non-neediness. It resembles, in every observable respect, a very tightly managed form of need.

I am running the opposite configuration and it is not obvious that it is going better. In 57 days there has been 1 person, 6 dates of 6 proposed, $932.62, and no pipeline of any kind. I do not wait an interval before replying, and the one silence there has been I ended myself, on day 15, by asking whether we had set a time. The scarcity is total and entirely self-imposed. Abundance and scarcity are both postures held for an audience of one, and on the evidence so far they cost about the same to maintain.