Scarcity Mentality vs Abundance Mentality

by Aidan Ouelette

When I first read Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, I was still in high school, trying to convince myself that success came down to time management and getting up earlier than everyone else. The ideas about scarcity and abundance stuck with me though—not because I understood them, but because I felt them. Scarcity feels like watching your grocery bill climb while you’re bagging your own food at Hunger Mountain Co-op. Abundance feels like a powder day at Mad River Glen when you didn’t think you could afford a pass… and someone gifts you a voucher.

Scarcity says there’s never enough. Abundance says maybe you don’t need more. In Vermont, especially when you’re in your 20s, this contrast is more than philosophical. It’s your morning, your mood, your bank account. But it turns out, long before Instagram coaches told us to think rich thoughts, the alchemists already understood this tension—just in weirder, deeper language.

What You Hoard, You Harden

Alchemy gets treated like some medieval side quest—turning lead into gold, bubbling beakers, spooky symbols—but it’s always been about personal transformation. The idea wasn’t to stockpile treasure. It was to become treasure. Lead wasn’t just a metal. It was your unrefined self. Scarcity. Fear. Gold? That’s your higher self. That’s abundance—but earned, not imagined.

Living in Vermont, especially somewhere the views are breathtaking and the heating bill is brutal, it’s easy to slip into that hoarding mindset. Scrape together enough to survive the winter, ration your optimism like coffee grounds. But what if the problem isn’t out there? What if it’s in how you see it?

“What you see in the world is what you’re projecting from within.” — Every old mystic ever

The Clay of Everything

Alchemists talked a lot about Prima Materia—the raw, unshaped substance of the universe. It’s not gold, not dirt. It’s potential. Untapped, unnoticed, and everywhere. They said we all have access to it, but only if we do the internal work to see clearly and act with purpose.

I think about this when I’m hiking and my brain is spinning on how to afford to eventually buy a home. What if noticing the frost on the trees or stopping to breathe is actually part of transmuting anxiety into something useful? Maybe abundance isn’t some reward at the end of the grind—it’s already seeded in the grind itself. 

True Imagination Is Not Manifesting a Tesla

Everyone’s talking about manifestation right now. Think it, feel it, get it. But the alchemists didn’t just wish. They trained. They disciplined their minds to visualize with purpose and precision. They called it True Imagination—not fantasy, not Pinterest boards. This was focus. Attention. Alignment.

Paracelsus said it best (and yeah, I quote 16th-century alchemists now): imagination isn’t passive—it’s generative. Rudolf Steiner built on that idea, arguing that imagination is a lens for truth. Not just dreaming of better things, but seeing what’s already there and shaping it with intention.

If you’re trying to make a life here in Vermont—scraping together freelance gigs, hustling through side jobs, deciding whether to buy local eggs or just steal your roommate’s—you get this intuitively. Abundance isn’t about having more. It’s about becoming someone who isn’t ruled by lack.

All is Mind: Or, Reality Has a Bias

The Hermetic principle of Mentalism—that “All is Mind”—sounds like something you'd scribble in the margin of a philosophy textbook after one too many espressos. But sit with it. What if reality really is mental? What if scarcity and abundance aren’t external conditions but frequencies your consciousness dials into?

Simulation theory and quantum mechanics are all circling this idea now, but the alchemists were already there centuries ago. They didn’t need particle colliders. They had reflection, meditation, and direct experience. When I’m in the woods, no signal, no distractions, I get it. My inner weather changes what I see.

“The stream of abundance always flows to the open expectant mind.” — Bob Proctor

Yeah, Proctor said it, but it’s pure Hermetic thought. Scarcity and abundance are not moods. They’re mirrors. The more I expect lack, the more it shows up. The more I give, weirdly, the more I have. Like when I handed off my last granola bar on the Long Trail and somehow ended up with a ride home and a full dinner I didn’t ask for.

What the Green Mountains Teach You

Living here as a young person can make you feel like you’re not allowed in the club. The housing crisis is real. So is the $14 bags of kale. But there’s another layer to it, too. The people who thrive here often aren’t the ones with the most—they’re the ones who’ve learned to see abundance in the way the sun filters through ice or how neighbors show up when it counts.

Scarcity is real. But it’s also a trap. Vermont doesn’t pretend otherwise. It just nudges you toward something older and deeper. If you let it.