Not Enough Time or Money? Could it be the Scarcity Trap?

Have you ever noticed how when you’re truly crunched for time, you seem to get busier and busier? That no matter how fast you try to click through the endless tasks on your To Do list, more items seem to magically appear?

Or maybe you’ve noticed that just when you’re feeling especially strapped for cash, weird new expenses hit you out of nowhere.

If so, you’re caught in something that Harvard economist Sendhil Mullainathan calls ‘The Scarcity Trap’, in his book Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much. It’s the mindset that often befalls us when we don’t have quite enough time or money.

In an interview with NPR, Sendhil, who is a MacArthur Genius grant winner, explained it in terms of his car registration. Or specifically, his inability to get it renewed.

Months after the registration expired, there he was, dodging police cars, rescheduling appointments and classes he was now late for and worrying incessantly. Yet … somehow he never could find the time to actually get the sticker renewed.

This is what we do when we worry about scarcity … we create even greater scarcity. We obsess over it. We fret, stew and worry, convincing ourselves that we can’t take the needed time to deal with the problem.

Instead, we strategize short term. We take out that high interest loan instead of fixing our income flow … or we hide from the police instead of taking an afternoon to visit the DMV. Which means, ultimately, the problem remains unfixed.

So we remain powerless in the situation. And we do, indeed, feel stuck.

“When you have scarcity, and it creates a scarcity mindset,” Sendhil says, “it leads you to take certain behaviors which in the short term, help you manage scarcity but in the long term, only make matters worse.”

In other words, you focus like crazy on meeting the most urgent needs, so the basis of the problem gets ignored. Which means there will be even more scarcity tomorrow.

I liken this to having a lousy job. Years ago, I worked in a toxic workplace, a huge advertising agency where I was a copywriter churning out commercials for big name dish liquids and deodorants. Routinely my boss would dote on his favorite writer, a woman I’ll call Diane, who always manage to steal my ideas and present them as her own work.

Every day I became more and more resentful … and yet, at the same time, I felt powerless to speak up or even look for a new job. Why? I was exhausted trying to just generate more ideas to compensate for those I’d just lost. Meanwhile, I fumed, plotted, and strategized about how to undermine Diane.

Rather than lodging a complaint with management, or even just stopping and taking a few days off to pull my copywriting portfolio together and show it around town, I dug in. I hunkered down.

And I stayed stuck.

In the end, Diane got the big promotion. And me? I got fired. Clearly, I’d been caught in the Scarcity Trap. In my race to get the boss’s respect, I’d forgotten my own self-respect and so bottomed out.

I’ve also seen it play out in money. You know the scarcity trap if you can’t stop racking up credit card bills – especially if you’re paying for things like loan consolidation services, or you invest in wild business schemes that you believe will finally bring about financial relief.

Sendhil, our Harvard economist, studies the economics of poverty, and has observed that poor people tend to make bad financial decisions, usually leading to deeper debt. And that’s often because they believe they can’t get ahead enough to make smart ones.

So the Scarcity Trap marches on. It’s a belief that there really ISN’T enough for you or whatever you need. That worry becomes so all consuming that it does not allow you to focus on what you actually DO need: a view of the overall picture.

The solution is surprising … and yet it’s not. Eldar Shafir, co author with Sendhil of a book called Scarcity, offers this:  Give yourself time to just think. Create a few windows of space within your day –(and this part is important) — especially the most crowded ones.

That’s how you break up the thought stream of the Scarcity Trap.

Make that precious Me time sacred. Do not let anyone take it away from you. Give yourself enough time to brainstorm, think, and make notes. Time to get inspired by your own small inner voice and find a new way.  Maybe it’s a half hour, or even an hour – and don’t tell yourself you can do this while you’re driving home. It needs to be truly unstructured, free form time.

The solutions to our problems are there … though we don’t always make time to listen to them.

But then think about it … isn’t this the way that most dilemmas are really, ultimately solved?

If you’re caught in the Scarcity Trap, may you, too, find your way to wonderful abundance.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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