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

by Michael Easter

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.