Scarcity and Abundance

Day 17 on the Camino

Today I encountered the second momentary feeling of scarcity on the path (for the first, refer to “Speaking for, and speaking over’). A customer tried to cut the line for breakfast, as they had already finished their food and just wanted to pay. They were promptly disregarded by the cashier, who told them to wait their place in line. The pilgrim heckled some more, wanting to just get on with their day as quick as possible, and after a few minutes of stalling the cashier gave up and gave them the bill.

I can’t say I identified with the pilgrim as much as I did with those a few days ago denied a bed. There’s no rush! I was so happy to take my time on my french omelette.

Beyond some minor discoloration around the edges, the environment that the Camino facilitates is wonderfully abundant - from the good-smelling flowers to the diverse crowd of walkers (from all walks of life, literally), to the beautiful collision of community at the dinner table.

But perhaps there is no better way to encapsulate the aura of the Camino than this: no one cares how far you go, how fast your walk, or who you walk with. Not to say they are nonchalant. They are as supportive as you could ever want them to be.

What I mean to say is that there is no judgement. Everyone on the Camino has already succeeded, or is actively succeeding, with every step they take, and how it happens really does not matter.

You could do it with not a single blister on your toes, or you could do it with the support of a foot massage every other day. You could do it with donation-based municipal albergues (hostels), or with first class luxury hotels every time you enter a city. Every single pilgrim’s journey is their own and no one else has the right to pass judgement. Only the privilege to contribute to it, with company, conversation, and community.

Conversely, in an environment of scarcity, the objective end goal is 1. more likely to be formally defined and universalized and 2. impossible for everyone to achieve at once.

In scarcity world, not every story is a success story. So we justify external evaluation on the process, or journey, to get there. We pick apart the success stories and find out how they were successes, and the same with the failure stories. We grant ourselves the right to pass judgement, based on a duty to learn from past mistakes.

I have found myself judging other people for their Camino, and subsequently facing the realization that I really have no right to do so. But in some sense we’ve been socialized to do exactly that.

When not everyone succeeds, it is often the case that those who do succeed really didn’t do anything special to succeed in relation to those who failed. You can fail even when you did nothing wrong.

So how is scarcity compatible with people’s life stories? On the Camino, I listen to one person’s story and then another and then another and I don’t compare them for any reason than to draw common threads or lessons. I appreciate where they don’t overlap because that’s so…human.

But I fail to see how it is in any way productive to compare two college applicant stories (I write about this because I was telling my Camino friends about the modern day US college application process), or the stories of two different folks running for the same public office. There are only so many spots, so am I supposed to judge that one story was better than the other based on the result? Who got in, or who won?

I think the Camino has reclarified for me this frustration.

Some big implications here:

First, if some stories are successful and others are not, people who chase success (a lot of us) have good reason to emphasize the parts of their stories that are empirically successful, and trivialize everything else. Or, just lie. This happens all the time in college applications, and House Rep George Santos of NY has been exposed for it. I don’t like lying about who you are, as a general principle.

Second, it creates undue emphasis on personal agency instead of environmental circumstance, because stories are not as much a success if someone just happened themselves into a position instead of playing an active role in that accomplishment.

To put this more generally, measuring stories by success incentivizes creating casual links when none exist. Every successful rags to riches celebrity or political figure or public name is a statistical anomaly, but the rhetoric is always about “Work hard enough and you’ll achieve anything!” But there are many more who worked just as hard who got no shot.

Third, it strips us of our curiosity. Instead of exploring different ways to be our fullest, we are encouraged to choose one of a few predetermined paths that have been successful in the past. It’s soul sucking and makes you feel emptiest.

Yes, part of me wanted to write this because I am an angsty college student who has no idea what he wants to do with his life who has 6 hours every day to worry more about it. So it’s nice to get it out before dinner, which has fast become my favorite part of these days.

There’s always plenty of food to go around.