In today’s society, most people are brought up and live in a mindset of scarcity, despite access to resources perhaps being more abundant than any other point in our history. What this means is that most endeavours are seen in one way or another as a project to acquire as large a part of a limited resource as possible. Despite this, there seems to be a subconscious societal understanding of the fact that most things that truly matter come from a place of abundance, like starting a family, finding inner harmony, and being happy. In all of these projects, you are not taking or apportioning a part of an already existing resource for yourself, but creating something from nothing through continuous and conscious effort.
In almost every other aspect of life today, however, we behave as if we are fighting for something that only a select few or one of us can have. We withhold information as if giving it away would let the other person take away whatever advantage we have currently. For those born in the right geographic regions, you compete for a limited set of seats at a college that grants you a way out of your current circumstances, or status and prestige — both of which are limited resources. Four years later, you're competing for seats in a PhD program, or positions at a prestigious company, or the attention of recruiters at job fairs, and even after that, you're jockeying for status in corporate and social hierarchies (and status is a zero sum game). Life is treated as a project of accumulation — spend the first half of it trying to get as much as you can, and spend the second half of it enjoying the fruits of your labour (it very often doesn't work like this, but that's an essay for another day).
Funnily enough, even though the fundamental motivator behind a lot of these scarcity-based behaviours is money, money itself is not a scarce resource at all. In other words, even though the jobs, degrees and positions that people jockey for are scarce resources, the resource that most people pursue these things for, capital, is not scarce in any way, shape, or form. Fundamentally, people spend money on things that bring them value. Create value, and you get money in return. And creating value is not an arcane art that only a select few can master — if you fix up an old car, tada~! You've created value and in turn capital.
But why, then, would people pursue jobs in the first place? The reason people pursue jobs and degrees despite this dynamic is because they are perceived to reduce risk. Actually figuring out how to create value and scaling that to a point where one is self-sufficient seems a lot harder and a lot scarier than just doing a set list of things as well as you can and having a steady stream of capital guaranteed afterwards.
This behaviour of hedging your bets, creating a safety net for yourself, and in turn viewing the world as a collection of scarce resources results in a mindset that tends to default to a zero-sum game view of the world, even when the ground realities are a lot different.
Take skill development, for example. A lot of people, be they beginners or experts, have a constant feeling of being "left behind" when they look at how much better other people their age are at a certain skill. When you look at the fundamental nature of skill development, this doesn't make any sense — as an individual, you are honing your ability to do a certain thing through repeated practice and learning. This process itself has no scarcity inherent to its structure. On the contrary, it is the perfect description of abundance — something that you can grow through personal effort at no cost to anybody else, with no limits, for as long as you'd like.
The reason this process results in feelings of inadequacy is due to the contemporary human's tendency to view most things as a marketplace. When you start practicing piano, you enter the marketplace of pianists that are themselves building up their skill to levels that you can't even fathom. It's not enough to just build your own skill and be good, you have to be better than everyone else. What's the point otherwise? This is simply manufactured competition by the mind of an individual whose only conception of excellence in skill is doing so to beat out others.
Skills as they are conceived of here have no one-to-one correspondence between people. It is not a ladder to climb in order to gain position on the skill hierarchy by surpassing others, nor a preset path in which the goal is to get as far as possible. You are essentially building up the repository of your skill, which before this was empty and is now gradually getting filled up by your effort.
The upshot of this is that when you look at artificial marketplaces in your day to day life, be they college acceptance pools or job recruitment, there is almost always an element of true creation that they are looking for, which most individuals try to substitute with status games and optimising for hyper specific criteria that are functionally useless. When you identify these events of true creation, you are now no longer in a situation of scarcity. True creation, like skill development, is an intensely individual pursuit that is as much a flourishing and enlargement of the individual as it is a pursuit of a project.
If a societal scenario has no such index, however, in that your status in it is determined solely by your adherence to completely nonsensical norms devised by the hierarchy itself, my best advice for you is to turn the other way and run as far as you can. Any system so far decoupled from actual value creation is actively harmful to the soul.
True creation almost always makes winning status games laughably easy. For example, publishing cutting-edge RL research is basically a guarantee of landing a position as a research scientist at a frontier lab. Building and running a successful hedge fund from scratch probably means investment banks will run to snatch you up. A large repository of technically excellent paintings means animation studios will probably welcome you with open arms. Of course, you could do these things in the pursuit of status as well, but approaching them as an instance of true creation not only exponentially multiplies your effectiveness and productivity, but is also generally a much better experience for you as a person.
Even if you fail at getting to your ultimate goal in this process, you still have something to show for it. But if you really engaged in true creation, in building something from scratch just because you could and because you love it, you probably wouldn't care if an external structure didn't grant you its approval, because you weren't doing it for them anyway.
True creation is always a project in abundance.
And since true creation is at the core of everything, everything is abundant.