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At a time when the World Health Organization estimates that about 280 million people worldwide live with depression, the emotional burden people are carrying is impossible to ignore. Not all depression comes from the same place, but for many people it is intensified by chronic comparison, repeated disappointment, and the aching sense of falling behind, what I am calling lack.

Lack is not merely the absence of money, status, or opportunity. It is a way of seeing the world. It is the feeling or triggered reminder that life has passed you by, that someone else has taken your seat, your blessing, your promotion, your future. It is the ache of unfulfilled dreams, the bitterness of loss, the humiliation of feeling behind.

And when lack is allowed to settle into the soul, it rarely stays there quietly. It grows teeth. It becomes anxiety, hate, fear, badmind, resentment, and depression. Over time, that inner war can affect the body as well as the mind; chronic stress is linked to immune disruption and broader health harm, and persistent envy has been associated with poorer psychological well-being and more depressive symptoms.

Popular culture too, offers a needed correction to the shame that often accompanies lack. For example my favourite Hollywood franchise, Star Trek, gives us one of the clearest insights through Jean-Luc Picard: “It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not weakness; that is life.”

The Bible understood this long before modern psychology gave it clinical language. “Turn the other cheek” is often read as a moral command, and it is that. But it can also be read as a protective strategy: do not let another person’s insult recruit you into a scarcity war. Do not let injury define your identity. Scripture is startlingly clear that inner corrosion has outward consequences. “A heart at peace gives life to the body, but envy rots the bones,” says Proverbs 14:30. And in Philippians, Paul says he had “learned to be content whatever the circumstances,” whether in plenty or in want. That is not passivity. That is spiritual mastery. It is the refusal to let lack become your landlord.

Many people do not even realize they are living from lack because lack is often learned so early it feels normal. A child grows up in drama and learns that love is scarce, attention is scarce, praise is scarce, safety is scarce. So the child adapts. One sibling plays one parent against the other. Another learns that tears can become currency. Another discovers that comparison is a survival skill. In a chaotic home, these tactics may feel intelligent, even necessary. But what helps a child survive can deform the adult. A strategy built for insecurity becomes toxic when carried into marriage, friendship, leadership, and work. That is why no one really wins in the end. Even when the tactic gets the outcome, it destroys trust. And once trust is gone, every victory becomes lonely.

You can see it in education. Imagine a brilliant student from a poor household arriving at an Ivy League campus. Everyone else seems to know the rules. Their clothes fit the room. Their speech sounds polished. Their confidence appears inherited. The student begins comparing accents, test scores, internships, family networks, shoes, even the ease with which others move through space. Competition itself is not the problem. Competition can sharpen excellence. But comparison without self-possession becomes self-erasure.

The tragedy is that many agents of socialisation have already planted the lie: success belongs to people who look a certain way, sound a certain way, come from a certain family, attend certain schools, and master certain codes. But life keeps producing counterexamples. Real success is more often sustained by competence, value creation, consistency, courage, and relationships than by conformity alone. Social comparison, especially upward comparison, is well documented as a mechanism that can damage self-esteem and worsen distress. Emphasis on “Sustained” as those driven by lack may enjoy what I call “transtemporal” but their lack-driven behaviour which manifests into toxicity generally makes success unsustainable.

Outside of education, the same script walks into adulthood wearing a suit. In the workplace, lack rarely announces itself honestly. It hides behind office politics, gossip, withholding information, false humility, strategic sabotage, hubris, arrogance and permanent offence. Someone else gets the promotion, and instead of asking, “What can I learn?” the person governed by lack asks, “How can I diminish them?” Someone loses a job and turns the whole world into an accusation. Someone feels overlooked and begins poisoning the room. For a while, these moves can look effective. But organizations, like families, eventually reveal the tax of scarcity behavior. Envy fragments teams, erodes collegial care, and feeds burnout. People do not keep leaning into those who make every success feel dangerous.

Today, social media has become one of the great amplifiers of lack. It is a cathedral of edited victories: filtered faces, curated relationships, monetized happiness, staged confidence, selective luxury. You do not merely see another person’s life; you see their highlight reel presented as if it were ordinary Tuesday. That environment is almost purpose-built for upward comparison. Recent research has found that social media use can worsen anxiety and depression through social comparison and approval anxiety, and systematic reviews continue to find meaningful links between heavy or problematic use and depression, anxiety, and psychological distress.

This is why lack becomes more dangerous with age. A child acting from lack may be wounded. An adult acting from lack may become destructive. By then, it is not only hurting you; it is shaping how others experience you. Chronic grievance exhausts people. Habitual envy isolates. Performed bitterness drives away loyalty. Eventually, the person ruled by lack becomes someone others avoid, then pity, then leave unsupported when the title, the beauty, the influence, the office, or the platform fades. Scarcity behaviour is self-defeating because it mistakes domination for strength and attention for love. It can win moments and lose lifetimes.

So what is the fix? Abundance. Not fantasy. Not denial. Not pretending pain is not real. Abundance is the disciplined decision to believe that another person’s success does not cancel your own possibility. It is gratitude without complacency. It is ambition without corrosion. It is the ability to see excellence in someone you once envied and ask, with humility, “What can this teach me?” Even the research on envy points in a sobering direction: envy predicts poorer future well-being, not greater success. The soul starved by comparison does not become stronger by feeding on more comparison.

The philosopher Aristotle offers a much healthier vision. The good life, for him, is not mere possession but flourishing, the steady cultivation of excellence in character and action. That makes abundance more than positive thinking. It becomes the disciplined work of becoming the kind of person who can live well, act well, and contribute well.

This is why abundance is more powerful than lack. Lack obsesses over possession, status, and proving. Abundance asks what kind of person you are becoming and what kind of contribution you are making. Star Trek imagined this clearly: “The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives. We work to better ourselves and the rest of Humanity.” It is a fictional line, but it contains a real truth: the healthiest lives are not built merely by getting more, but by becoming more.

One reason Donald Trump remains such a vivid public example in this conversation is his relentless projection of scale. Love him or dislike him, delusional or otherwise, what he models is not modesty but magnitude. He speaks in the language of winning, momentum, strength, and possibility even in the face of defeat (a subjective term governed by what lens you wear). As of March 2026, he is again the sitting U.S. president. What some people dismiss as delusion can, in another reading, another lens, be understood as radical psychological occupation of abundance: the habit of acting as though the future is still available to you. Of course, abundance without truth becomes fantasy, and confidence without discipline becomes collapse. But disciplined abundance is powerful. It allows a person to move before fear has finished writing the script. Oprah has many videos on YouTube that articulate this. And she lives it sustainably.

This is the deeper wisdom. Lack narrows your vision until all you can see is what you do not have. Abundance widens it until you can finally use what you do have. Lack makes you reactive. Abundance makes you creative. Lack breeds imitation, panic, hatred, and envy. Abundance produces gratitude, steadiness, generosity, and forward motion. Lack asks, “Why them?” Abundance asks, “Why not me too?”

So guard your heart. Notice the old scripts. Interrupt the inherited drama. Refuse the lie that your value depends on matching someone else’s face, accent, background, body, salary, title, or timeline.

Peace is not weakness.
Contentment is not laziness.
Gratitude is not surrender.
Vulnerability is not fragility.
Patience is not passivity.
Discipline is not punishment.
Humility is not inferiority.
Forgiveness is not forgetfulness.
They are forms of power.

They are the quiet architecture of abundance. They keep the soul from being drafted into the exhausting wars of comparison, resentment, performance, and revenge. They allow a person to remain open without becoming naïve, ambitious without becoming bitter, disciplined without becoming cruel, and wounded without becoming poisonous. In a world that often confuses noise with strength and hardness with superiority, these qualities represent a deeper kind of power. They steady the mind, protect relationships, preserve dignity, and keep the heart from collapsing into lack.

And here is the final truth: abundance usually achieves more than lack ever can, because abundance frees your energy for building. Lack spends that energy on comparison, resentment, and performance. One builds a life. The other only comments on someone else’s.

Choose the life that can still bless others while it rises. Choose the heart at peace. Choose the work of becoming. Choose abundance.

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Lloyd Waller is Professor of Digital Transformation Policy and Governance and Director of the Sir Arthur Lewis Institute for Social and Economic Studies