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

by Michael Easter

It’s not just that we, personally, can’t know everything. It’s also that we now have so many experts with competing views that we can’t even find the right experts. We must pick which expert to trust from a field of hundreds, even thousands. Many of them disagree entirely. For example, licensed doctors, dietitians, psychiatrists, and exercise physiologists might tell us completely different ways to eat, think, and move to be healthy. This is the philosopher Elijah Millgram’s “great endarkenment” again. He explains that today’s world contains thousands upon thousands of experts in niche academic fields and work specialties (like art hanging). These “experts” have thrust so much information into the world that it’s impossible to understand the deeper nuances of most topics. Roughly three million scientific journal articles are published each year, and the number grows 5 percent annually.