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

by Michael Easter

People who become addicted later in life often discover that drugs or alcohol help them cope with a bad situation or dark horizon, Satel explained. For example, it relieves the anguish of the loss of a job, the death of a family member, or a downturn in their general living situation.

Insightful

Addiction is not a choice. Instead, it’s a summation of repeated choices that make a different choice harder to make for environmental, biological, and historical reasons. It’s deep learning.

Deep Learning

It happens through small decisions we make daily.

any habit that provides short-term escape and comfort but causes long-term problems.

“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.

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.”

substance abuse, the most pernicious scarcity loop.

“When communal conditions are dire and drugs are easy to get, epidemics can blossom,”

“How do you help patients who come to you with addictions or even compulsions around other habits?” “My main advice is to make a big change,” he said. “Change your circle. Go to school. Educate yourself. Get a job or change your job. Take courses

to improve your skills. Learn to read and pour yourself into books. Actively go out and make friends or change your friend group. Make big changes.” Embrace short-term discomfort to find a long-term benefit.

Szalavitz explained that a key reason most people get clean by thirty is that “once people hit that age, suddenly their life is more constricted. They don’t have endless time to sit around and get high or recover from hangovers. They get married and get a career and start raising kids, so they begin finding meaning and purpose and love and comfort elsewhere.”

The data shows just over 2 percent of the world’s population is addicted to drugs or alcohol. A study in the Journal of Psychiatric Research suggests the percentage of people addicted to technology is now roughly the same.

I used to drunk post restaurant reviews online,” he told me. “An L.A. Times editor came across my posts and was like, ‘Do you want a job?’ ” That gig helped Nguyen pay the bills as he studied for a PhD in philosophy at UCLA.

“So Twitter was getting into my brain and how I think, seizing my motivation systems.”

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, board games underwent an intellectual revolution.

Like my experience trying to figure out slot machines, Nguyen needed to skip the academics and follow the money.

Why do we put ourselves into these fabricated struggles that, in the grand scheme of things, give us problems for the sake of having and (maybe) overcoming them? The answer is complex, but it has to do with the scarcity loop and how it can be a fun and comforting escape from the chaos of modern life.

Games

“One of the biggest transformations in my life as a philosopher and how I think about the value of games came from a book by the philosopher Elijah Millgram called The Great Endarkenment,”

Look into book

Human wisdom is no longer a shallow pond. Now it’s akin to a multitude of bottomless lakes.

Great quote

So in life, we have to do this painful and awkward thing of trusting people and information and making decisions beyond our understanding.”

Insightful

humans hate uncertainty so much that we’d rather experience punishment.

This is why games are so powerful and why we play them. “Games are a balm for the confusion and anxiety of real life,”

“In real life, when we face failure, when we confront obstacles, we often don’t [get up and try again]. We feel overcome, we feel overwhelmed, we feel anxious, maybe depressed, frustrated, or cynical. We never have those feelings when we’re playing games; they just don’t exist in games,”

Points, leaderboards, badges, performance graphs, constant notifications, and more started to appear in all kinds of digital spaces to bend our behaviors.

We began gamifying anything we could: exercise, learning, weight loss, shopping, advertising, and even health care and warfare.

gamification industry

gamification just tells you, ‘Here’s how and why you care about it.’ ” And we fall in line. “So gamification can increase motivation, yes, but at the cost of changing our goals in problematic ways.”

Points and gamification begin to remodel our experience, our behavior, and how we define success.

“value capture.” When we stamp a simplified scoring system on an activity, we begin to fixate on the scoring system and chase points rather than experience the activity’s original goals.

What is value capture?

Are they just a tool in the sense that a hammer or guillotine is a tool? He told me it depends on why and how we use it or any other gamified scarcity loop. To use it well, we would need to resist the pull of points and establish different goals.

Social Media

We establish unpredictable rewards on our terms.

Some people see money as an end, while others see it as a means to an end.

Reflect

We prefer metrics. So our attention and values naturally shift toward what’s easily measurable at scale and away from all these other, more complicated things that matter more.”

“So now students obsess over their GPA rather than focusing on whether they understand the skills and ideas they need to thrive in the job market,”

Yet we never define what health means to us in the first place.

“AirSpace.” Businesses are designing themselves to appeal to social media users.

One reason we like escaping into the scarcity loop is that there is no uncomfortable, anxiety-inducing uncertainty in it.

“It’s fascinating that numbers have become so powerful to us at an emotional and behavioral level,”

But the cultural trajectory over the last thousand, and especially the last few hundred, years has led us to quantify everything and believe that quantification means absolute truth.

We must see them for what they are: gray oversimplified scores that can tell us a little bit, but far from everything.

We go up the hierarchy until we eventually reach what he called “self-actualization” needs. He described self-actualization needs as “becoming everything [we’re] capable of.”

Self actualization - Research

here’s the more important thing: expressing that we care, ironically, is the worst thing we can do for our status. Nothing hurts our status more than letting others know we care.

Interesting insight

But our minds always look for the relatively minor differences we have with others and form our sense of self and societies around those differences. “People come to define themselves against their neighbors,”

we have a whole toolbox of emotions that depend entirely on other people’s thoughts, feelings, or actions.

Emotions like embarrassment, guilt, shame, jealousy, envy, empathy, and pride don’t work in a vacuum.

These emotions are tools that compel us to work with others (or not) so we can th...

Scarcity brain craves influence because the more influence we have over others, the more likely we are to survive and spread our DNA.

Most of us will even take status and influence over money.

Status ponds are more important than we realize. How we feel at any given moment is surprisingly linked to the pond we’re in.

Other research shows that our desire for influence is also at the root of violence.