Post 3: There Is Too Much of Almost Everything

For post 3, I am continuing from the closing of Post 1 in this series where I am further expanding on abundance, surplus and opportunities. These posts are meant to be short, concise and will provide the initial foundation and layout for the concepts we will explore later on in the series. It may be helpful to understand the basis by dipping your toes in the water before diving head first into the deep end.

Look around your house. How many cables, clothes, dishes, tools and electronics do you own?

Now zoom out to every house, apartment, hotel, restaurant, warehouse, store, office and factory.

We live in an astonishing world of abundance.

Wi-Fi exists almost everywhere. Computers sit idle. Phones sit on nightstands. Cars are parked for hours. Tools may not be touched for years. Clothing goes unworn. Food is discarded. Warehouses are partially empty. Factories could often produce more. Electricity can be valuable at one time and nearly worthless at another.

The first instinct is to call this waste. I think that is too simple.

Excess has different forms

Some excess can be stored. – Lumber unused today can be used next year.

Some cannot. Unused bandwidth at 2:13 a.m. cannot be put in a warehouse and used next Thursday. That makes it perishable capacity.

The same applies to an empty airline seat, machine hour, compute cycle, freight capacity, restaurant table or electricity at a particular moment.

Other excess is intentional. Companies maintain backup equipment they hope never to use. A homeowner may own a generator used once every five years. A factory keeps spare parts because shortage could shut production down.

That excess purchases certainty.

Redundant abundance

Imagine an apartment building where hundreds of households independently purchase internet plans capable of far more bandwidth than they normally consume. Hundreds of routers may sit only feet apart and while yes, they are all connected to the internet, they are disconnected from each other in the sense that each user is essentially paying for excess.

Each household rationally purchased enough capacity for its own peak. Collectively, however, the building contains enormous redundant capacity.

Everyone prepares for their own worst case, but everyone’s worst case does not happen simultaneously.

The resource may not be the excess

It is tempting to turn every observation into a marketplace: unused tools, empty rooms, spare bandwidth.

Those may in fact turn into businesses in the future such as Uber or VRBO, but that is not my goal with this project.

The more interesting questions are why the excess exists, why it persists, what information is missing, what permission is missing, what standard is missing, and what aggregation threshold is missing.

Maybe excess itself is not the asset. Maybe it is evidence pointing toward the real asset.

In Post 4, we will take a look into the question as to why we own so much stuff and why we almost never use it.