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

by Michael Easter

We seem to believe our internal and external conditions will be perfect and that we’ll be able to finally “arrive” and rest once we fulfill our next want. This is a delusion.

Once we’ve met our desire of the moment—no matter how big or small—our brains seem to produce the next one. It’s a sense that we’re one move from where we want to be. But once we make the triumphant play, the board expands.

So “do I want to be right or happy?” is now a question I try to ask myself whenever my desire to influence others is pulling me in the wrong direction.

Here’s a good rule of thumb to help you decide whether to buy something new or donate an old item: decide within sixty seconds. The psychology researcher Melissa Norberg, who is the president of the Australian Association for Cognitive and Behaviour Therapy, wrote, “Whenever you find yourself taking longer than a minute to make a decision, it’s likely you are trying to find a justification for making an unnecessary purchase or keeping an unneeded item.”

In the modern world, if we push back against our tendency to add—forcing ourselves to solve a problem with what we have—we’ll likely solve it better, more creatively and efficiently. Creativity and efficiency bloom under scarcity.

The experience led me to a rule to guide my future purchases. I landed on “gear, not stuff.” Stuff is a possession for the sake of it. Stuff adds to a collection of items we already have. We often use stuff to fill an emotional impulse or advertise to society that we’re a certain type of person. Or it solves a perceived problem we could have solved better with a bit of creativity. Gear, on the other hand, has a clear purpose of helping us achieve a higher purpose.

The researchers explain that information hits a rate of diminishing returns. When we know nothing, adding information helps us make better decisions. But if we continue piling on information, we hit “information overload.” At this tipping point, more information usually leads to worse decisions. The more complex information we deal with, the sooner we hit the tipping point.

In the past, we had to either accept not knowing or enter the unknown to find out. We were constantly weighing trade-offs, determining whether scratching our information itch was worth it. But now it takes no effort to scratch, and we scratch so much that we bleed.

“It’s easy to make delicious food if you give up on its nutrition,” he explained. “The same happens with truth: it’s easy to make seductively clear ideas if you don’t care about truth and nuance.”

Vande Hei told me the same. “I think this is where seeking out ideas that contradict your own comes in,” he said. “You don’t want to just be reinforcing a preheld belief.”

Perhaps most importantly, our online middleman also alters the rewards we can get from discovery. Searching everything we do before we do it kills new experiences. Remember how Zentall said that we get deeper rewards from things we had to work harder to achieve.

This is a phenomenon noticed by the fourteenth-century Islamic scholar Ibn Khaldun. He found that societies fall in a similar pattern. The founders of a society work hard under harsh conditions to establish it. These harsh conditions require and develop social cohesion, as we might see today in military units. But, over time, generations follow that become too far removed from the original hardship and work ethic it took to attain prosperity and maintain a society. These generations become soft and comfortable and adopt an attitude of entitlement. This ruins the society from within while making it prone to attack. Which is exactly what happened to Rome, albeit over about five hundred years.

In my work and thinking, I now think of it as balancing science with soul. Too much science, and we lose the most important aspects of the human experience. Too much soul, and we can lead ourselves into delusion.

Then he continued. “You’re going to die—you need to face that,” he said. “As healthy as you are right now, one day you won’t be. Your body will fade. Then what? You’re left with a soul. So you also need to focus on that. You need to find a deeper meaning. That’s the thing. People focus too much on happiness. No one will ever be perfectly happy all the time because happiness is a moving target. It’s better to focus on things we know are good and seek them. Then happiness becomes a by-product. Happiness comes by putting everything else in order and subordinating it to the ultimate goal. For us that ultimate goal is seeking God.”

Modern research and thousands of years of wisdom indeed suggest that it’s hard for humans to see and appreciate our blessings if they’re always at hand. Purposefully going without can help us realize how great it is to have—to appreciate the wonders of our world of abundance. It’s an idea embedded in ancient mythology and most religions.

Gratitude often comes from scarcity, an idea backed by modern neuroscience.

Chasing human relationships for the sake of our own happiness can become its own hollow and pernicious scarcity loop.

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

He continued: “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. You’re the only one who can do it. Ultimately, it’s you and something larger. That’s the drama of all human life. And it’s worth being a part of.”

“What I struggle with most today is people complaining about trivial things or wasting their time. People wasting their time really bothers me. People label it as me just being an irritable vet. But I think it’s a case of seeing each moment as precious and knowing that I’m watching lost time.”

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 can reduce how frequently we buy by viewing our purchases through the lens of gear rather than stuff. It’s taking a utilitarian mindset and applying it to our current and future possessions to accomplish more of what truly enhances our lives and gives us meaning.

After analyzing thousands of years of mythology across cultures, Joseph Campbell explained the story like this: The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek. When I considered the experiences that most changed me for the better—experiences that made me more appreciative, present, empathetic, and helpful—all of them were difficult.