The Age of Sustainable Abundance

1250 words, 6 minute read

What are you waiting for? The Second Coming of Christ? (That’s been delayed.) The Apocalypse? (Mercifully postponed.) The Age of Aquarius? (Hair notwithstanding, cosmologists tell us we have another 200 years to wait.) But according to Elon Musk, this is the dawning of the Age of Abundance…Sustainable Abundance! But that is, not everywhere, an occasion for celebration.

“We are suffering just now from a bad attack of economic pessimism. It is common to hear people say that the epoch of enormous economic progress which characterized the… (previous) century is over; that the rapid improvement in the standard of life is now going to slow down…The increase of technical efficiency has been taking place faster than we can deal with the problem of labor absorption…” 

Does this sound familiar? Of course it does! You hear the equivalent every day. So would you be surprised to hear that this was written in 1930 by the famous economist John Maynard Keynes (JMK)? And that the previous century Keynes refers to is not the 20th but the 19th?

The more things change the more they stay the same! “There’s nothing new under the sun.” It’s always about the Bulls and the Bears! And two things we know: (1) Discounting divine intervention, the Bears will ultimately win out; it’s called Heat Death; and (2) Until that time, it’s all Bulls! (Chicago, Pamplona, Wall Street)

And yet… “There is no country and no people, I think, who can look forward to the age of leisure and of abundance without a dread. For we have been trained too long to strive and not to enjoy…” (JMK)

As a species, we struggle to imagine a future that is anything other than a thinly disguised version of the past. As a result, we form a vision of tomorrow that, so far as possible, recapitulates today, warts and all. And who isn’t dissatisfied with today? Who’s ever told a pollster, “I like things just the way they are?” (Hint: No one!)

‘So far as possible’ – and to the extent that it’s not possible, we paint the future in the darkest colors possible. So we reject the status quo but we shrink from the future in so far as it differs from the status quo. It’s a wonder there’s ever been any progress at all…and it’s no wonder that so many cultures harbor the notion of a long lost Golden Age, before today’s problems became problematic.

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What we have here is a failure of imagination! Consider our Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) . As far as we know, all living organisms on Earth are descended from a single DNA molecule that synthesized about 4 billion years ago.

That makes you a distant cousin of some pretty unusual characters: bacteria and slime mold, mushrooms and mosquitos, palm trees and penguins, whales and water bears …and my personal favorite, the kitchen sponge (natural, not synthetic). 

Idea: Restage Hamlet Act 5, Scene 1 with the Prince of Denmark holding a sponge in his hand instead of Yorik’s skull. 

You also have some pretty impressive ancestors hanging off your family tree – kids with cool street names like Dino and Dodo, Raptor, Sabretooth, and the Great Auk. I went to High School with Tom Roberts, a boy who claimed to be descended from Blue Beard, the pirate. You’ve got Tom beat six ways to Sunday! 

We see that the process of evolution responds to variations in the environment with incredible morphological and functional diversity. Yet when we consider the possibility of life on other planets and their moons, we assume that it will be similar to our own. Therefore, we search the heavens for Earth-like conditions as if life chooses its environment. The fact is, if there is extraterrestrial life, there is every chance that it will assume forms and behave in ways that none of us have ever imagined.   

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We believe that the laws of physics apply everywhere in the known universe. For the sake of argument, let’s assume that’s true. We also assume that any intelligent life form, exploring the universe from its vantage point, would adduce the same laws. But not so fast!

Even if physical processes are universal, there is no guarantee, no likelihood even, that other intelligences will model those processes the same way we do. An article in New Scientist (3/3/2026) by Daniel Whiteson, a particle physicist conducting research at CERN and teaching at the University of California, makes the case:

“Lately I have started to wonder whether physics is less a window onto universal reality and more of a mirror, reflecting the particular kind of minds we happen to have…Would alien scientists, shaped by a different biology or culture, arrive at the same physics that we have? Or might they develop something that works just as well, but looks utterly foreign – built on concepts and assumptions we would struggle to recognize?”

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The Catholic Church has long placed the basic human need to engage in meaningful, healthful and justly compensated work at the heart of its Social Magisterium. The advent of Sustainable Abundance will require a rethink! 

Ironically, the two great ideologies of ‘the previous century’ (the 19^th), Marxism and Catholicism, are both centered around an outmoded concept of work. Yet both are utopian: It’s hard to imagine wage labor in Paradise.

In fact, the relationship between human labor and economic prosperity is already starting to fray. The collective need for our work will soon shrink exponentially. Accordingly, our idea of a ‘meaningful life’ must expand to include much more than just wage labor…and that will take work of its own, a lot of work! 

So, fast forward 100 years from JMK: the torch has passed to a new generation…and Elon Musk picked it up (September 1, 2025):

“The elimination of scarcity will require tireless and exquisite execution. Some will perceive it as impossible. And plenty of others will laud every obstacle and setback we inevitably encounter along the way. But once we overcome this challenge, our critics will come to see that what they once thought was impossible is indeed possible…

“Today we are on the cusp of a revolutionary period primed for unprecedented growth. And this time it will not be a single step but a leap forward for Tesla (sic) and humanity as a whole. The tools we are going to develop will help us build the kind of world that we've always dreamed of—a world of Sustainable Abundance—by redefining the fundamental building blocks of labor, mobility and energy at scale and for all.”

As Industrialization was to the 19th century and Computerization to the 20th, so Artificial Intelligence is to the 21st. While a handful of pioneers are working to shape and extend this new technology, most of our energy will be spent debating and resisting its promise. 

According to our talking heads, we are to reject a Leisure Economy, fueled by Sustainable Abundance, in favor of a Labor Economy, motivated by economic insecurity and driven by Conspicuous Consumption. Yup, what we have here is a failure to imagine! A failure to imagine what is already coming…if only we’d let it.

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Giacomo Balla’s Abstract Speed + Sound (1913–14) doesn’t just depict a car rushing forward—it imagines a world where motion, technology, and sensory overload become the defining forces shaping human experience. In many ways, its fractured lines and vibrating energy anticipate future movements driven by high‑speed travel, digital acceleration, and the increasingly blurred boundary between human perception and machine‑generated environments.