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

by Michael Easter

mind, the scientists studied groups they called “unsocial.” These people don’t have social anxiety or other fears and just prefer being alone. Give them a choice between going to a party or spending the evening home alone with a good book, and they’ll take the party of one, thank you very much.

I’ve realized that I don’t need another to feel okay.

When pressed, the happiness researchers recognize that millions of people throughout history have found immense meaning and satisfaction in the deep work of solitude.

Spirituality counters what scarcity brain pushes us into and asks us to do the deep work.

“Ask, what should I do with my life? Where am I supposed to go? What am I supposed to be doing? Who am I? What does all this beautiful order mean? Those are questions you have to ask yourself seriously and answer.

Reflect

“Well,” he said, “there was a purity and focus of life and mission there. The extremes of the human condition and human experience put life into such sharp focus. It recalibrates you in a way you can never come back from. It reminds you what’s really important in life.”

You learn to live more meaningfully when you can die at any moment.”

You feel most alive and focused when decisions feel like they have the ultimate consequence.”

There’s a thin line between post-traumatic stress and post-traumatic growth. Some people who have experiences like Moreno, Shaw, and Boulden never really return.

thought a lot about the will to live. For nearly all of time our ancestors had to practice the will to live. Each day we’d struggle for more, powered by the scarcity loop to persist. And when we’d find what we were looking for, we’d experience deep rewards.

“That extra psychological value encourages future persistence and energizes us to keep looking. I think that gets translated in the modern world in which humans value things they had to work longer and harder to get.”

The scarcity loop, as it too often exists in our modern world, has flipped. Today it pushes us into short-term comforts like mind-altering substances, online diversions, and acquisition.

we can too easily escape into our modern scarcity loops too often for reasons other than fun—at the expense of long-term rewards, growth, and meaning.

Moreno said, “How can we pass on the lessons of these experiences without people having to actually go through them? I think part of it is taking small risks in everyday life. Seeking adventure and experiences that build perspective.”

The slot machine engineers in Las Vegas told me that a person stuck in a scarcity loop only stops for three reasons: the opportunity goes away, the rewards stop trickling in, or the repetition slows down.

We learn to fall into addiction when a substance or behavior gives us an easy opportunity to solve our problems and improve our lives for a fleeting moment.

work hard to solve our problems in a different way and create new and better oppo...

We can determine for ourselves what we want the rewards of a behavior to be.

We can invent our own game with different goals that enhance how we spend our time and interact with others. These goals will be harder to measure, but they’ll be far more meaningful than anything we can quantify.

We can slow down the quick repetition embedded in our modern food system by eating Tsimane-like foods.

if we must, remove the opportunity entirely by not keeping the foods that t...

We can reduce how frequently we buy by viewing our purchases through the lens of...

We can resist our informavore brain and its craving for certainty and answers to every unknown.

We can do what humans of the past did: exercise our drive to explore; break new ground on the map and in our minds.

We can get out into the world and work to know the unknown. That’s what leads to wisdom, understanding, and a storied life.

We can shift scarcity loops into abu...

find hobbies that have the three parts of the scarcity loop but help us do thin...

harder work the activities require can make them more rewarding.

Or this could be exploring a new place and seeing what unpredictable rewards it might hold, as simple as trying a new restaurant without googling it first.

Or it could be shifting our search for happiness to something tangible that improves our happiness along the way, like helping others, doing the next right thing, or understanding ourselves better.

Remember that most species become bored of getting the same reward every time they do a behavior.

Improving our lives still requires enduring short-term discomfort for long-term achievement. It should still guide our actions today.

The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.

But that abyss has forced me to exercise the will to live in new ways.

Maybe it’s to improve as a human as you hammer. To callous your hands, build endurance, and improve your craft of life and living it.

“You risk so much by hesitating to fling yourself into the abyss.”

Research quote