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

by Michael Easter

Federal regulations are seventeen times longer than in 1950. American homes are three times larger than they were in 1970. We own 233 percent more clothes than we did in 1930. Restaurant portion sizes are four times larger compared with 1950.

Everything from our cars, to refrigerators, to microwaves, to coffeemakers is larger and packed with techy smart features (like, why does my dishwasher need to connect to the cloud?).

Political Twitter became 23 percent more toxic across the decade. And this is because, the researchers wrote, “uncivil tweets tended to receive more approval and attention [measured by] large quantities of ‘likes’ and ‘retweets.’ ” The scientists also noted that once the politicians got a rush of likes and retweets from a mean tweet, they became more likely to boost their future tweets’ meanness.

Politicians from both sides of the aisle fell into this nasty loop. And it might be one thing if this crappy behavior, like in regular games, were screened off from every other part of their life. But, critically, the repercussions rippled. The politicians used the same tactics to guide their policy thinking and decision making—that is, the legislation that affects our lives. Right now.

In 2022, the executive editor of the New York Times told his journalists to spend less time on Twitter. The reason: Since the rise of Twitter, journalists were increasingly framing their stories not in a way that found balance, truth, and objectivity. They were framing their stories in a way that scored points with their Twitter followers, many of whom were fellow journalists rather than the public. This in-group point scoring was diluting the Times’s worldview. The public intellectual Bari Weiss, who worked at the Times, called Twitter the Times’s “ultimate editor.”

cardiovascular disease is—by far—the thing most likely to kill me, you, and everyone we know. It now kills more people globally than our eight other top causes of death combined.

The results? If you give a human a cookie—or cheeseburger or royal blue yogurt or mashed potatoes injected with butter and cream and topped with thick salty gravy—we will eat more and more of those foods until we fatten up and die of heart disease. If you give a human plain yogurt with some berries—or plain potatoes, lean meat, or rice—we will eat just enough of those foods. We’ll be less likely to fall into a scarcity loop of food.

“One of the problems of abundance is that everyone can design their own diet. In the past, if you didn’t eat what everyone else in the family ate, then you just didn’t eat. Nobody was going to make something special for you. This also led to a kind of family control on portion size in the diet, because there used to be enough food but not enough for everybody to have as much as they wanted,”

“But today many children grow up believing they can pick whatever they want within reason. People aren’t tasked to accommodate their tastes to anyone else anymore. There’s an incredible individualization of our diets. This has ruined the sociality of eating to a very large extent.”

The average American purchases 37 items of clothing each year. One study found we now own 107 items of clothing. That study also detailed how we feel about those 107 items. It discovered that we consider 21 percent of those clothes unwearable. We think 57 percent of the items aren’t great—either too tight or too loose. Then we have an average of 12 percent we’ve never worn. And that leaves us with a Martha Jefferson–esque 10 percent—11 items—that we regularly wear. The EPA says we throw away about sixty-eight pounds of clothing and textiles per person per year.

Yes, even many dogs in the United States now have more possessions than Americans just a few hundred years ago.

There are now more self-storage facilities in the United States than McDonald’s, Burger Kings, Starbucks, and Walmarts—combined.

Newborns, for example, scan and visually explore new scenes for far longer than old ones. This helps brain development. Other research shows that infants and toddlers who are allowed to explore the world develop better and faster than those who are helicoptered and kept mostly in the same place. The explorer kids gain language and physical skills faster, build stronger immune systems, and better understand the world. They even sleep better.

recent study in Psychological Research discovered that a group who walked freely with their awareness on the open world scored significantly higher in a creativity and idea test than people who walked while focusing on their phones. Another study found that children who walked for twenty minutes improved their concentration and ability to understand complex information. The

For example, in national parks only 14 percent of visitors meander beyond a paved road.

The first group, the bombing news bingers, were more likely to develop PTSD and other mental health issues. That’s worth restating: people who binge-watched bombing news on TV from the comfort of home had more psychological trauma than people who were actually bombed.

Just as slow food has advantages over fast food, slow information is often better than fast information.

Benedict believed that monks and the public alike should have enough in proportion to their needs, but nothing to excess. And that goes for everything: food, possessions, influence, and the like.

He called this “proportion.” It’s the recognition that every human has different needs and temperaments. Most religions preach moderation or the middle path. But Benedict understood that “moderation” is different for everyone. Enough for one person might be too much for another might be too little for another. Benedict even taught that self-denial and going with too little often stirs up pride, a snooty “holier than thou” attitude. Having too much

We today—even the richest of us—rarely see ourselves as so extraordinarily lucky and fortunate and happy, even though, for the first time in human history, there is more than enough.”

Perhaps our influx of more of everything we evolved to crave paired with our industrial happiness complex—obsessing about and pushing happiness—is making us feel as if any day that isn’t pure bliss were problematic and leading us to chase the wrong things.

Work can express our relationship with the world around us. As such it will not always be rewarding, just as life isn’t. But if I believe [work] can be no more than instrumental (paying bills), I will never notice what else it could be. If I simplistically equate self-satisfaction with work’s value, I’ll miss what else work, even tedious work, can yield. Conversely, looking for deeper dimensions in work may motivate me not to be exploited on the job, not to over-work, not to reduce my life to how much I can accomplish or equate my [self-worth] with my work-contributions, earning power or talents. After all, I own none of those; they are visitors and they may not always call. A day will come when they visit me no more.

But, particularly when something bad happens, “we realize we should ask for help. So we pray. And it helps. Prayer helps. It’s easy, it costs nothing, and it takes thirty seconds. Prayer is lifting your heart and mind to something larger than yourself. There’s mental prayer, vocal prayer, meditation.”

“Prayer can only be done by humans,” said Brother Brendan. “We can get grace from prayer. It can benefit our souls directly. It can change our souls for good, so all that we do immediately afterward will hopefully be better for others and, in turn, for us. It can help us be less self-obsessed and focused on the bunker mentality.”

“We’ve found that the people who live past a hundred and are exceedingly satisfied with their lives tend to be religious,” he said. “When all is gone, when all is lost, and not everything works for these people, they still have hope. They still have something they can seek solace in. It’s like a survival mechanism for longevity. God is something they can rely on, talk to, trust, and feel like is there for them.”