I’ve tried to give my son everything he needs to succeed. But that doesn’t mean I will give him everything he wants. There’s a reality in any pursuit: to be excellent, you’ll need to put in the work or delay gratification to reach your full potential. If a parent gives a child everything they want, there’s no incentive for them to learn and improve.

To a child, everything provided for them is a given, and every task required is an injustice. Why should they have to wash the dishes? The grumbling or attempts to negotiate last longer than the time it would take to finish the chore. And, honestly, the easy route is just to do it ourselves. But that deprives a child of the opportunity to learn all those transferable life skills—at the very least, to get a little practice being helpful rather than entitled.

If we shower children with abundance, they will never appreciate what is given nor ever be satisfied. It seems that no matter what we have, we always want more. If given the moon, we’ll want the other planets and the stars as well—and then we still won’t be happy with that. The greatest satisfaction comes through work and accomplishment. Playing video games all day or scrolling social-media feeds may trip reward centers, but it amounts to empty calories and can’t replace substance.

I’ve watched spontaneous interviews with very wealthy men, and nearly every one of them says that their abundance did not bring happiness. At least one admitted he was suicidal despite millions in assets. Our peak enjoyment in life comes when we invest time, effort, and resources and eventually reap the fruit of our labor. Sure, going to the gym may be difficult, but the endorphins are addicting and the muscles are a reward.

Built for Scarcity—Not Utopia

I watched a video about the problems with utopia, and the framing of capitalism as a system built for scarcity was correct. We would need a radically different way of ordering ourselves if the things we wanted just grew on trees. If you could have whatever you wanted without effort, why would you pay for anything or even care who owns it? My property rights only matter because it costs something to acquire or replace the things I own. If everything we wanted was free and completely abundant, we wouldn’t need to value it at all.

The presenter, who seemed intelligent enough, made a critical flaw while talking about providers of generative AI. He claimed that those charging for the service were creating artificial scarcity “because the code is open-source or whatever.” But this totally ignores the immense computing power that’s required—the powerful microchips, massive amounts of energy, and the staff needed to keep it all running. So no, that isn’t an example of abundance.

I’m used to naïve takes coming from the religious side, but it’s fascinating to see secular thinkers stumble over the very same things. Yet it touches directly on the human condition. We are not wired for abundance. Ultimately, even if we could reduce human labor to zero, our brains were created for scarcity, and when faced with unnatural abundance we don’t actually do very well.

Material wealth, to start with, is never a cure for boredom or lust. If anything, those who have all their physical needs met are often left with a void of purpose. Their abundance never creates fulfillment or a reason to be in the world. And some appetites are basically insatiable: a man can have all the sex he wants and still desire the one he cannot have. It is often the ultra-wealthy—those who have everything we imagine would make us happy—who are also the most perverse and dissatisfied.

It reminds me how young-earth creationist (YEC) types often portray entropy as purely negative when it is as necessary for life as order. Fertile soil, for example, contains organic compounds that come from dead plants and animals. This is part of a cycle—neither good nor bad—like the weather. The same forces that bring a spring shower can also leave behind a swath of destruction. Creativity itself often lives at the edge of order and disorder. You may not enjoy a messy room that needs cleaning, but without it your life would probably feel pointless.

Furthermore, social hierarchy would be the only game left if we completely removed the need for productivity and occupation. If AI replaced all jobs, the result might be material abundance, but not utopia. As the saying goes, “Idle hands are the devil’s workshop,” and some people with nothing to do will create drama. Boredom is good when it provokes us to create something new, but bad when the “new thing” is us causing trouble for others for lack of something else to do. It is better when we need to do something productive to survive, because we’re primed for it.

Consider how an overly sterile environment can trigger autoimmune disorders; similar problems would arise in a world where struggle was fully removed. It wouldn’t solve our environmental or energy problems—there would still have to be limits and rationing to keep from stripping the planet bare. Some people will never be content with the base level of property and possessions. There will still be scarcity even if human labor is no longer a cost. Advantages will still exist. At that point a new hierarchy will form—perhaps one based solely on beauty or charisma—where many have no path to “level up.”

In capitalism, while there’s an advantage to those who go first, there are multiple paths to success. Sure, there is cost-cutting at the expense of quality (see the Campbell’s Soup controversy), but there is also genuine efficiency and a system where nothing need go to waste. Bad actors create opportunities for others. If Enzo Ferrari hadn’t been a pompous jerk, we wouldn’t have Ford’s GT40 legacy or Lamborghini. Ferrari’s rude remarks were the provocation that pushed others to build cars capable of beating his. In a free market there is a profit motive to share rather than hoard. In a post-labor AI world where elites no longer need human workers or customers, would they have any incentive to distribute limited resources?

Abundance, Unearned, Robs Good Character

The video is correct that abundance won’t lead to utopia—yet it misses the deeper reason why. It isn’t just that we’d get bored or turn to status games (true as that is). The real problem is that abundance without cost quietly deletes the only proven mechanism we have for turning a human being into a person worth becoming. 

When everything is given for free, nothing is cherished.  When nothing is earned, nobody is grateful.  When no one is grateful, no one is generous.  When no one is generous, society stops being a community and it becomes a zoo with really nice cages: no material need unmet, the trough always full, and yet we are no different from a lion removed from its natural habitat.

That’s why I won’t hand my son the life he thinks he wants. I’ll give him everything he truly needs: enough security to take risks, enough scarcity to make victories sweet, enough resistance to grow muscle around his soul. I’ll let him wash the dishes, wait for the game he saved up to buy, lose the race he didn’t train hard enough for, feel the sting of “not yet” and the glory of “I finally did it”.

Because the cruelest thing a parent can do isn’t to let a child struggle.  The cruelest thing is to raise him in a world so padded, so instantly gratifying, so artificially abundant that he never discovers the one truth every happy adult eventually learns: The joy was never in finally getting the thing.  The joy was in finally becoming the kind of person who could get it—and still know it wasn’t the point.

Scarcity isn’t the enemy of human flourishing.  It’s the narrow gate we have to squeeze through to find out who we actually are.  And I want my son on the other side of that gate—tired, scarred, proud, alive, and deeply, durably grateful—not because he was given the universe, but because he earned his small, yet irreplaceable and fully human corner of it.