After my recent trip, I feel a little purged. It took a journey across Türkiye, North Macedonia, Greece, and Crete to wake me up and truly see the vast gulf between the world I was born into and the reality that so many others live every day. We call it a post-COVID world, but that phrase can mean whatever it means to you—no debate here.
Let's go back in history a little. From 2013 to 2020, I survived as a street musician, scraping by in places from the geographic span of Türkiye to Ireland. I lived off the kindness of strangers, busking my way through cities, playing original music alongside covers of Western songs—globalised tunes that brought in coins, even when they felt out of place in lands rich with their own traditions. Often, I’d arrive in town broke, looking for a restaurant or a street pitch just to earn enough for the next meal or the next leg of my journey. I thought the world owed me that much. I lived like this, gallivanting through these cultures without ever stopping to question the privilege I carried with me or enquiring much about the culture I was in.
In Skopje in 2018, I’ll never forget the moment that snapped me out of my entitlement. There I was, playing music in that patchwork city, when a suited man dropped a 1,000 denar note (about 17 euros) into my guitar case. In an hour, I’d made more than a local worker behind a counter made in an entire day. That was the moment when it hit me—how long I’d been walking through the world feeling hard done by, as though I were a victim of the system, when in reality I was a tourist in other people’s struggles. The political songs I sang, all the railing against injustice, started to feel hollow in that light. What right did I have, as an Australian busking for coins, to claim I was fighting for freedom when those on the streets around me would trade their lives for mine in a heartbeat?
That man’s generosity was a mirror—and what I saw in it wasn’t pretty. He probably worked in one of the new IT jobs in the region, from which has spawned the rise of hipster culture, from jazz bars to skate shops amidst Gypsy kids drumming for hours while their parents searched for scrap metal on a horse and cart. This gift forced me to step back from my self-imposed martyrdom and face the fact that I wasn’t a spiritual crusader. I was just another entitled fool asking for money from people who had less than I did, telling the world it owed me something for singing my songs.
Skopje is a city like that—a place where wealth and poverty rub shoulders, where the old world and the new stand side by side. It makes you see the world’s contrasts with startling clarity. And I had to stop standing on my pedestal and start seeing things for what they really were.
Last month, I flew back from Istanbul. I spent hours talking with my bandmate, an anthropologist and oud player from Istanbul. We recorded The Butterfly’s Burden back in 2018 in Skopje with Katerina Dimitrovska from Perija and other session musicians. Our conversations often turned towards this idea of “abundance manifestation” that’s taken hold in the West—the belief that positive thinking alone can create a better reality. It’s seductive, but there’s a darker side to it, and I’m not afraid to poke a stick. In fact, it needs it at a time like this in history.
This idea—that we can manifest abundance simply by thinking positive and avoiding negativity—is, at its core, proto-fascist. It’s a self-serving, blinkered philosophy that ignores the fact that most of the world doesn’t have the luxury of thinking their way out of hunger. Imagine telling someone in a war-torn country or a person working themselves to the bone for pennies that they’re struggling because they haven’t “focused on abundance.” It’s insulting. It’s privilege masquerading as wisdom. It’s a mindset that says, “If you’re not successful, it’s your fault,” while those of us born into comfort conveniently ignore the systems of inequality that keep others down.
There’s a fine line between self-help and self-delusion. If you’re so focused on your personal gain that you can’t see the struggles of the people around you, what are you really manifesting? More greed? More isolation? This New Age spirituality might seem harmless, but it has a way of turning people blind to the suffering of others. At its worst, it tells us that the world’s pain can be solved by thinking better thoughts—no action, no engagement, just “positive vibes only.”
But this isn’t just about spirituality—it’s about responsibility. Those of us with privilege don’t get to manifest our way out of reality. We have the greatest responsibility of all because of this very fact. We have to get our hands dirty. It’s fine to want abundance, but if it only serves yourself, you’ve missed the point entirely. We need to be part of the world, not float above it in some bubble where everything’s perfect and polished, where we block out the pain of others because it feels inconvenient.
Yes, the mind is powerful—there’s truth in that. But power without responsibility is dangerous. If your privilege blinds you to the fact that most people can’t afford the luxury of dreaming big, then you’re walking down a dark road. There's a large shadow tailing you, and it's gonna catch up.
Life has pain, discomfort, hardship. You can’t manifest your way out of that, no matter how hard you try. The sooner we face that, the sooner we can use whatever power we have to help lift others up. And that’s the true point of abundance, isn’t it? It’s not just about gathering wealth and comfort for yourself—it’s about creating a world where more people can share in it.
In the end, we’re all connected. True abundance means responsibility, connection, and action. So if you’re manifesting, make sure it’s not just for yourself—make sure you’re lifting others along the way. That’s the only way this whole "abundance" philosophy holds any real weight. It’s time to get our hands dirty, to face the grit of reality, and realise that real change starts when we align our will with the needs of the world around us.
(Picture: Polishing Boats at Hillarys Boat Harbour in Perth, Western Australia)
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