A friend of mine said the other day that prosperity was an unnatural state. That sentiment bothered me.

"Prosperity requires work."

Since work is required to secure prosperity, prosperity is innately unnatural.
Okay.
That's the argument.

What if work is natural though?

What Is Work?

Using nature as a benchmark, we can see that prosperity isn't hard to come by: something's always doing something like gangbusters everywhere. While it's true that every plant, fungus, insect, bird, and beast are bustling along in what you could easily call "work," how unnatural is any of it?

Does a spider fight against itself to build a web?
Do the underground fungi connecting all sorts of plants across whole ecosystems begrudge their burden?
How hard does an ant think they have it?

Even in the Aryan sense of work as effort applied for benefit beyond the actor and the immediate moment, nature is inescapable. The fungus and the ants mentioned above meet the criteria. Squirrels can plan at least for winter for themselves. Birds have done some elaborate things for their families. Unless some punch-clocks are hidden out in the wild somewhere I haven't looked yet, it seems like work is pretty damn natural.

Input/Output

The mistake is to think that prosperity is only input. It's initially tempting to thing that simply having everything one could want is the height of prosperity, reality doesn't play that out. Lottery winners are infamous for being worse off in the long run. What do they do? They take, and take, and take. They have everything, until every one of those things takes them. In contrast, the world's richest people are off doing something almost every day: they can take a lot more time off than the average working Joe, and they certainly don't toil like one often imagines when they think of "hard work," but all that's irrelevant. Those at the apex of prosperity push out as much as they take in.

"Love the process" is essentially embracing the need for output. In the fitness world, success hinges on consistency; and consistency is only as possible as much as you love the process of getting fit itself. Every artistic field espouses the need to create, create, create, and to enjoy creating no matter what comes of it.

If you operate from the perspective that work is unnatural, then prosperity is as a matter of course going to be unnatural too. The issue, however, is not with work. The contention sprouts from a logical framework that is entirely out-of-line with nature in real life. One can never hope to produce the end-condition of a state while not abiding by that state.

Cause and Effect

"Just a note: for every action, or lack thereof, there's a consequence."
— Ill-Logic, from the Aesop Rock track "One Brick"

If you do something, something will happen. If you don't want what happened, either change what you do or change your expectations. You'll get better at anything you do, if you want to improve at it. The better you are at what you do, the more will happen when you do it. All "prosperity" is, in a practical sense, is when you enjoy the consequences of your actions.

Putting a block on your mind that says that says what you're doing is somehow in defiance of how the world fundamentally operates is only making what you strive for more difficult to do, and your desired results take longer to achieve.

Nothing else in nature does that~