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

by Michael Easter

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.