Scarcity Brain: Fix Your Craving Mindset and Rewire Your Habits to Thrive with Enough

by Michael Easter

Today it’s well accepted that for most of human history, obeying the next scarcity cue and constantly craving and consuming more kept us alive. We evolved in harsh environments that had one thing in common: they were worlds of less, of scarcity.

Once we know something is pleasurable or rewarding, dopamine is primarily released when we’re pursuing and anticipating receiving that pleasurable thing, not when we’re actually receiving the pleasurable thing.

Sure things are boring. Unsure things captivate us and make us likely to repeat again and again. Consider the slot machine. It would be nice if it paid the same amount every game. But playing it wouldn’t be exciting. It would be called a job.

Despite the criticism new tech receives, it’s delivered many social benefits. To take just one example, some data suggests there was a drop in the suicide rate among LGBTQ teens after the introduction of social media. Social media connected LGBTQ teens in small towns. They could form a support network that wasn’t previously there.

In the end, he said, our life is ultimately a collection of what we pay attention to.

In the human brain less equals bad, worse, unproductive. More equals good, better, productive. Our scarcity brain defaults to more and rarely considers less. And when we do consider less, we often think it sucks.

“If people were thinking about either addition or subtraction, then choosing to add, it would be one thing. But if people aren’t even thinking of this basic option of subtraction, then that’s a big problem. This is arguably the most fundamental question about how we change and make things better. Am I going to add, do more, or am I going to take away, do less? And we are finding that people systematically overlook the option of subtraction and doing less.”

No wonder we’re experiencing what researchers call “time scarcity.” It’s a feeling that we don’t have enough time. The truth is that we have more time than ever, thanks to advances in human longevity and the changing nature of work. Still, we cram our lives with so much compulsive activity, things “to do,” that we feel pressed.

Remember we now have an abundance of all the things we’re built to crave. Everything from the food we eat, information we digest, social ladders we climb, and items we possess has shifted in ways that often clash with our evolutionary drives. Consistently obeying our drive for more in our world of more seems to be making many of us sick and miserable in ways obvious and unexplored.

“Our minds are less efficient when they feel they lack something—whether it is money, time, calories, or even companionship.”

“If we were designed by engineers, as we consumed more, we’d desire less. But our frequent human tragedy is that the more we consume, the hungrier we get. More and faster and stronger. What was an unexpected pleasure yesterday is what we feel entitled to today, and what won’t be enough tomorrow.”

Research from Cambridge University shows that our brain changes its chemical response to a reward based on our past experiences and expectations. For example, let’s say we win $1 million. Sounds great, right? It is. But only if we anticipated winning less than $1 million. If we expected to win $1 million, then it’s decent. But if we planned on winning $2 million, then winning $1 million is experienced as a disappointment.

We’ve long viewed substance use as a bizarre anomaly—a function of either broken morals or broken brain chemistry. But there is a growing recognition that drug use in our past was nearly always good. It helped us survive.

“So if you learn that this one thing really makes life worth living or solves your problems, you’re going to make some rather weird choices, and it’s going to look like you’re hijacked. But you truly believe that this is the best choice given the context that you’re in. It’s a completely rational choice because, if your life sucks and this is how you can get meaning and pleasure, well, that’s a rational choice.”

“There’s a zillion ways a person can recover,” said Szalavitz. “But they tend to all be getting a new passion and a new sense of meaning and purpose and community and connection. One person might fall in love with exercise. Another might get really into rock climbing. Another person might hate both of those things and need to see a specialist for an issue like childhood trauma they were managing with drugs. But it’s all about figuring out how to find your way in life again and deal with whatever led a person to become addicted in the first place.”

“Problematic technology use is about the interaction between the product, the person, and their ability to cope with discomfort, and then a situation in their life that causes a pain that they’re not equipped to deal with. When you have the confluence of these three factors at the same time, it can create an experience you can put yourself into where tech products help you immediately forget about all your problems.”

In regular games, it doesn’t matter that the goal is to abide by silly rules in the name of arbitrary points because regular games happen outside everyday life. The entire point is to abide by silly rules for stupid points for a screened-off moment. Remember we play games for a fun escape from everyday life. The slot machine stays in the casino (or gas station or grocery store). The marathon ends at the finish line. Clue ends when we discover it was Colonel Mustard in the study with the candlestick. So do the repercussions: Our significant other doesn’t actually care that we financially devastated them in Monopoly. Football players don’t tackle each other off the field. If they do, they wind up in jail. “But when we try to gamify ordinary life,” said Nguyen, “we’re trying to impose clear values on a preexisting thicket of values, on a system that is very uncertain and complex.” We abide by silly rules in the name of arbitrary points for parts of life that aren’t silly and arbitrary.

Research shows that tweets with strong moral emotions, like outrage, score the most likes, retweets, and followers. The scientists call this “moral contagion.” And, just like a virus, it is indeed contagious.

Political Twitter became 23 percent more toxic across the decade. And this is because, the researchers wrote, “uncivil tweets tended to receive more approval and attention [measured by] large quantities of ‘likes’ and ‘retweets.’ ” The scientists also noted that once the politicians got a rush of likes and retweets from a mean tweet, they became more likely to boost their future tweets’ meanness. This scarcity loop of constant unpredictable rewards and quick feedback ramped up their Twitter use and turned them into monsters.

grades arose as a way not to help students improve and think better but to make administrators’ lives easier. For example, grades and grade point averages allow school admissions officers or potential employers to make quicker judgments about a person’s aptitude.

“My most promising students usually don’t receive an A. They’re too freethinking. Or they’re gritty hustlers who work forty hours a week while taking on a full load of courses. My most promising students are usually in the B to A- range. “My students who get As, on the other hand, are more likely to be the more robotic and less creative ones. Or they have wealthy parents who pay for their schooling and have more time to study,” I said. Yet the A students are most aggressively recruited by businesses and into the top leadership positions. This reinforces a business world that increasingly favors measurement over big, creative ideas that can move the ball farther downfield. No wonder Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Oprah Winfrey dropped out of college.

“There are a million ways to quantify something and arguments about how best to do that quantification. For example, what variable you’ll control for or not control for and what the data actually means. These are very debatable and often flawed human decisions. It’s just so, so complex. There are just so many layers of gray. But when that gray data moves down to the general public, the public often view it as black and white. As fundamentally true.”

Metrics, of course, aren’t useless. But we need to realize that they don’t account for the human experience. All the experiences we can have throughout everything we do, and how those experiences can affect us and others. We must see them for what they are: gray oversimplified scores that can tell us a little bit, but far from everything. Outside forces can use them to pull us into a scarcity loop that is divorced from reality and our best interests, walking us into places we may not want to be. Then it’s worth occasionally taking a different path. Embracing the gray and wading into uncomfortable water to figure out why we’re doing something in the first place, and what all those somethings really mean to us.

We like to think we’re immune to these status reminders. Nope. We’re not. For example, researchers at the University of Toronto and Harvard recently discovered that incidents of “air rage” were on the rise. That is, people going batshit crazy at thirty thousand feet. The scientists wanted to know why. So they studied more than a million flights and roughly four thousand cases of air rage. They assumed the uptick in incidents was entirely due to flying becoming a more hell-like experience every year, with more fees and delays and less leg room. They were wrong. They discovered that the chances of economy passengers spinning into a fit of anger were four times higher when the plane had a first-class cabin. This status and influence cue increased the odds of an incident the same as having a nine-and-a-half-hour delay. And if the economy passengers had to board through the first-class cabin, the figure spiked to an eightfold increase. That awkward walk past “first class” citizens subtly makes us more likely to want to destroy the class system all together. To have a mid-flight French Revolution and line up the elites at the guillotine.

Most of us will even take status and influence over money. One poll found that 70 percent of workers said they’d prefer a better title over a raise. They believed the better title would lead others to view them in a more respectful light and give them more influence. Not just more influence over their co-workers. More influence over everyone else in their orbit—their neighbors, family, and friends. This led to another fascinating finding, this time from scientists at Cornell University. It’s better for our physical and mental health to be a bigger fish in a smaller pond—that is, having a higher rank at a smaller company—than to be somewhere in the middle of a big, well-known company. Even if we make more money at the bigger company.

When we ask ourselves, “Do I want to be right or happy?” we take the long view and insert perspective into the equation. But we can also bend the question. It could be “do I want to look good or be happy?” Or “do I want to one-up this person or be happy?” Or “do I want to be right or be a good friend, co-worker, or significant other?” And on and on. Play with it.

We also fret about the wrong things. The average American is nineteen times more likely to worry about cancer than cardiovascular disease—going down anxiety-ridden rabbit holes with Dr. Google and her diagnosis that each of our physical anomalies is surely stage 4 cancer. This is like obsessing over a strange-looking mole on your trigger finger as you play a slow game of Russian roulette.

The scarcity loop helps explain why 95 percent of people who lose weight in a given year eventually gain it back. When we begin to lose weight, the scale gives us unpredictable rewards every morning. Our weight changes unpredictably, trending downward in an exciting way. But when weight loss stagnates, the number becomes predictable. The unpredictable rewards no longer trickle in. Dieters get frustrated—and extinction occurs. They slide back into their old habits. A solution: Stick to your diet but find another behavior that rides the loop and aids your goal. For example, lifting weights. As you become stronger, the amount of weight you can lift and number of times you can lift it changes unpredictably and trends upward in an exciting way.

Negative information, the scientists believe, triggers our brain to unconsciously assume a famine is nigh. This reaction to scarcity cues was a feature that first came about long before humans. Pick any animal. When it thinks resources are scarce, it responds by eating. A lot. It attempts to put on weight. Bulking up is a brilliant defense mechanism.

Pair our scarcity brain with the modern news cycle, the rat race of life, abundant ultra-processed food, and the limited-time release of the McRib. Congrats, you have an elegant formula for folks who waddle.

“People struggle to see through all the health marketing. But, usually, packaged ‘health’ foods are actually more processed, because it’s way harder to make a cookie taste decent if you’re not using flour, sugar, or dairy, or any of these things. So I think the brain is getting impacted on so many levels: from a marketing perspective, but also because so many of our ‘health’ foods are hyper processed and therefore so easy to overconsume.”

Eating heavily when given the opportunity kept humans alive and well for millions of years. But for most of us, it outpaced our brain’s innate ability to find enough.

An international team of researchers recently analyzed fourteen different diets and found that sustainability is critical. As the brilliant nutrition scientist Layne Norton, PhD, explained, “What this analysis showed is that we need to ask, ‘What is going to be the easiest diet for you to adhere to in the long term?’ And you should probably do that.”

While it’s true that our ancestors didn’t have as much as we do today, the idea that there have ever been people today, yesterday, or even millions of years ago who didn’t care about stuff is a fairy tale. “All people are materialistic to some degree,” wrote scientists in the academic textbook Consumer Behavior. “People naturally yearn for more of whatever material resources are prized within their culture.”

Indeed, despite feel-good, Disney-movie ideas about our ancestors being “one” with nature, taking only what they needed, the truth is often quite the opposite. Nature was often brutal and much more like a Tarantino film. To survive, we often had to be equally brutal. And it’s nearly always been better for our survival to have too much stuff rather than too little.

In the United States, levels of six air pollutants including carbon monoxide and lead have declined by 77 percent since 1970. Meanwhile, our GDP and population grew by 285 percent and 60 percent, respectively. We’ve reduced our total carbon dioxide by 13 percent since 2007. That’s thanks to simple economics and smart government environmental regulations. Not only are we using resources more efficiently, but we’re also seeing old innovations merge into one. For example, in one of my lectures, I show students a famous RadioShack advertisement from 1991. It featured all sorts of products on sale at the store: a computer, a telephone, a clock radio, a stereo, a calculator, a police scanner, a camcorder, a camera, a voice recorder, an answering machine, and more. And the original advertisement was, of course, printed in a newspaper. “All of those items have now vanished into smartphones,” explained McAfee. Put these two phenomena at scale and combine them with wise government interventions that reduced pollution and protected wildlife, and we’ve been able to improve the human condition while treading more lightly on the planet. We’re now consuming fewer resources, using less land, polluting less, and even bringing back species we’d nearly pushed to extinction. All as our population grows and living standards rise. McAfee said he’d bet that in a decade we’ll be using fewer resources than we are today, regardless of how much our population and economy grow.

“Hearing people’s stories and just letting them talk. I think that’s when I got the idea that I really just wanted to experience the entirety of the human condition. The ins and outs, ups and downs, goods and bads of it and just have a really rich experience of living,” she yelled through the thin Montana air. “I didn’t think these human experiences would be all good. But I thought they’d all be important. They’d change my perspective. Because I could see that everyone is just doing the best they can with what they have, you know? Generally people are good. But we all fit the mold we cast. If we focus on the negative, we’re going to look for negatives. But if we approach things with even a small amount of compassion and real interest and give people the benefit of the doubt, we can see how people don’t fit our narratives. We find that people are amazing.”

Every fall, the cold sets in and changes squirrels. It leads to a release of hormones that trigger their little squirrel scarcity brains to go into hoarder mode. The squirrels begin collecting and storing as much food as possible for winter. But these seasons can go one of two ways. Fall hoarding is a relaxed endeavor if it’s been a good summer for nuts and seeds. It’s like going to the Mall of America with friends and a fat wad of cash. The squirrels gather, saying hi to their squirrel neighbors as they do. They place all their nuts and seeds in a burrow and let it be as they casually add more to it. But the situation changes if it’s been a bad summer for nuts and seeds. Scarcity makes the scene apocalyptic. The squirrels become defensive and paranoid. They think their neighbor squirrels are trying to steal their stuff. They’ll fight with other squirrels over scarce nuts and seeds. And then, once they’ve amassed a large enough hoard, they’ll prepare for more conflict. They’ll stand like a bouncer at the entrance to their burrow, ready to defend the hoard.

Preston explained that both overaccumulation and minimalism are “often driven by a kind of perfectionism where you want to do everything just right. There’s a sort of anxiety, but it’s different from overaccumulators. Overaccumulators have anxiety that they’re going to make a mistake and need something, so they collect and collect. But [minimalists] have a kind of anxiety around disorder and having so much they can’t escape.” Whether it’s keeping all sorts of odds and ends in your home for fear of possibly needing them one day or going all in on minimalism, “the behavior helps people find a sense of control,” she said. This is why blindly aiming for less doesn’t work. Minimalism looks good in photos we share online, but it doesn’t solve the underlying problem that we think it will. As with addiction, a better question is to figure out what’s bubbling under the surface. Why do we want less in the first place?

“After my first mission on the station, I would have said that you can’t see the stars very well from the space station, because we have too many lights on inside,” he said, with the camera still pointed toward Earth. “But then I started coming up here a half hour before everyone else would wake up. And I’d shut off the lights and just sit with my eyes open and sort of meditate, not trying to think about much, but rather just trying to soak it in. It was challenging at first, but ultimately amazing. My eyes would adjust. Space actually isn’t the inky black that I described to people after my first mission. It seemed to me that the stars we normally see as individual stars weren’t really that way. I could start picking up the faint stars super far away. There were so many of them that it seemed more like shades of gray and white and black. It was more of a texture, a net. And that changed how I think about perception, the limits of human knowledge, and how we have so much more to explore.”

Scientists once believed hunger, thirst, sex, or some other survival need drove everything humans did. But Harvard psychologists in the 1950s discovered that humans and many other animals are driven to explore.

Soon after, in 1925, scientists built on Pavlov’s ideas about exploration. They discovered that rats would cross an electrified grid that shocked them just for the privilege of entering a new territory. Other studies found that to explore, monkeys will put themselves through four hellish, frustrating tests—the monkey equivalent of taking the bar exam. What’s critical is that none of these lab animals were hungry, horny, thirsty, cold, or in danger. In all cases, these animals explored when all their needs like food, sex, water, and safety were taken care of. They explored just to explore.

Researchers from Yale say our extensive foot travels created an epic exploratory feedback loop. The more we explored, the more resources we could get, especially from food. The more resources we could get, the more we could fuel the development of our amazing brains. The more our amazing brains developed, the more we could figure out how to explore new territories. This might be why still today walking while paying open attention to the world can enhance creativity, concentration, and understanding. A recent study in Psychological Research discovered that a group who walked freely with their awareness on the open world scored significantly higher in a creativity and idea test than people who walked while focusing on their phones. Another study found that children who walked for twenty minutes improved their concentration and ability to understand complex information. The scientists wrote that unfocused walks could “support cognitive health and may be necessary for effective [brain] functioning across the lifespan.” Enhanced focus and creativity while walking might have helped us note important landmarks, dream up ways to go farther, and survive while exploring.

Having more information made us far less likely to die at any moment. It paid to figure out where our next meal was coming from. Or to discover new areas for food and other resources. Or to know whether a storm might be rolling in, understand other people’s motivations, or predict the future. The more information we could get, the more likely we’d acquire food, sex, stuff, status, and more and avoid the situations that might kill us.

A group of scholars in the U.K. wrote that when radio arrived in the early twentieth century, it “finally cracked the secret of immediate transmission of information in real time to the masses.” Radio programmers learned that media could “own” people’s days, feeding them constant information. Then we got TV in the 1950s. It was the ultimate information portal. In just a decade, the average person went from watching no TV to watching five daily hours of it. Then we got the internet. This altered the source of mass information. It no longer came from some broadcasting or publishing company on high. The internet allowed anyone anywhere with a modem to be a broadcaster or publisher. To fire information into the ecosystem that anyone could read, watch, or hear. The result: At the start of the twentieth century, humans spent no time taking in digital information. By the 2020s, the average person spent between eleven and thirteen hours of their day consuming information on-screen and through speakers. Now 40 percent of this content is “user generated.” It’s the YouTube and TikTok videos we watch, blogs and Reddit threads we read, and many podcasts we listen to. Some scholars estimate that in one day we are now exposed to more information than a person in the fifteenth century encountered in their entire lifetime. Much of it leverages the scarcity loop to make us feel self-righteous, outraged, happy, sad, or correct—all so we’ll see ads.

Consider, immediately after the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings, researchers from the University of California, Irvine, investigated two groups. The first group was made up of people who watched six or more hours of televised bombing coverage. The second group was people who actually ran in the 2013 Boston Marathon. The finding: The first group, the bombing news bingers, were more likely to develop PTSD and other mental health issues. That’s worth restating: people who binge-watched bombing news on TV from the comfort of home had more psychological trauma than people who were actually bombed.

The researchers explain that information hits a rate of diminishing returns. When we know nothing, adding information helps us make better decisions. But if we continue piling on information, we hit “information overload.” At this tipping point, more information usually leads to worse decisions. The more complex information we deal with, the sooner we hit the tipping point. But as informavores we have no clue when we’ve hit this tipping point. Scarcity brain still craves more information because it evolved in a world where information was scarce and more was better. Psychologists gave a good rule of thumb for making decisions in a sea of information. It’s similar to the rule we can use to determine if we should keep or discard an item. Make everyday decisions within sixty seconds. After that, analyzing more and more information only wastes time and doesn’t steer us into significantly better outcomes.

“We often don’t realize to what degree our behaviors are not explicitly conscious choices but are driven by these sorts of subconscious chemical actions that get hijacked,” Hanke told me. “It creates something that could potentially be called addiction. If you don’t want to call it that, it’s highly incentivized repeated behavior.”

As humans evolved in rough-and-tumble landscapes, the desires we’ve investigated throughout this book helped us survive. Each time we’d use a drug or get more food, possessions, prestige, or information, we’d be rewarded with good feelings of pleasure or joy. That, in turn, produced the mysterious and rewarding feeling we call happiness. Yet the feelings were fleeting, because tomorrow we’d again battle for scarce resources. It was something of a scarcity loop. We’d take an opportunity to improve our lives, feel suspense as we waited to learn the unpredictable outcome, and then experience happiness if we were successful. But this happiness was just a brief hit. We’d again be shot right back into dissatisfaction and longing. Into the anxiousness and suspense of seeking the next fix of whatever it was we thought could bring us pleasure and joy. Repeat this cycle for life. But this cycle kept us alive. As we evolved, sustained happiness would have killed us. It would have been more of a bug than a feature in our mental hardware. If anything permanently satisfied us, we’d have given up on tasks that were necessary for our survival and died off. And so we lived in a scarcity loop of happiness.

The economist Brad DeLong explains that before the Industrial Revolution the comfortable people of the world had to “attain such comforts…by taking from others, rather than by finding ways to make more for everyone.” In other words, if they wanted to be happy, they probably had to make another unhappy. But today, DeLong writes, “less than 9 percent of humanity lives at or below the roughly $2-a-day living standard we think of as ‘extreme poverty,’ down from approximately 70 percent in 1870.” That figure is adjusted for inflation. “And even among that [poorest] 9 percent, many have access to public health and mobile phone communication technologies of vast worth and power.” We’ve turned incredible experiences into everyday features of living. DeLong writes, “So many of us have grown so accustomed to our daily level of felicity that we utterly overlook something astounding. We today—even the richest of us—rarely see ourselves as so extraordinarily lucky and fortunate and happy, even though, for the first time in human history, there is more than enough.” We produce enough food, shelter, clothing, and stuff that no one has to be hungry, wet, cold, or without necessities (and when people are without those necessities, it’s usually a problem of distribution and politics). Yet scarcity brain, as those U.K. neurologists found, still craves and clings to emotional swings. It can’t sustain happy feelings. The same cycle that helped us survive in the past—happiness followed by dissa...