Abundance and Meaning: What Abundance Exposes

Abstract: The meaning crisis attributed to post-scarcity conditions is not created by abundance but exposed by it. Public discourse frames automation-driven abundance as a transition problem: when labor ceases to be necessary, what replaces it? This framing presupposes labor-meaning was working — that it provided a valid ground for selfhood that must now be substituted. The deeper diagnosis is that what scarcity scaffolded was a specific configuration of egoic dissociation — what this essay calls the productive-output self — that fuses dignity (intrinsic) with valuation (assigned by output), making personhood contingent on contribution. The configuration is distinct from pre-modern role-based identity, which generally held dignity and valuation apart; the modern Anglophone capitalist fusion of the two in monetary units is its sharpest expression. Wisdom traditions across cultures have independently identified this fusion as wrongly drawn. The convergence holds at the structural level — dignity as intrinsic, cultivation as the developing of decentered relation, selfhood realized through gift and participation rather than accumulation — while positive doctrine diverges across traditions; the recurrence is constraint-candidate evidence, not a claim of perennial truth. Ownership of automated production can maintain the configuration through new infrastructure — algorithmic curation, attention economies — even as abundance removes its old scaffolding. Abundance is not the crisis or its cure. It is the inflection point that exposes whether the configuration can be recognized and released, or will be rebuilt. Keywords: automation · post-work · self-constitution · dignity · cross-traditional convergence · constraint analysis · ownership · hegemony · meaning crisis · karma yoga Part of the Return to Consciousness research program — 30 philosophical essays exploring consciousness-first metaphysics. Full project: https://returntoconsciousness.org/