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

by Michael Easter

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...