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

by Michael Easter

We like to think we’re immune to these status reminders. Nope. We’re not. For example, researchers at the University of Toronto and Harvard recently discovered that incidents of “air rage” were on the rise. That is, people going batshit crazy at thirty thousand feet. The scientists wanted to know why. So they studied more than a million flights and roughly four thousand cases of air rage. They assumed the uptick in incidents was entirely due to flying becoming a more hell-like experience every year, with more fees and delays and less leg room. They were wrong. They discovered that the chances of economy passengers spinning into a fit of anger were four times higher when the plane had a first-class cabin. This status and influence cue increased the odds of an incident the same as having a nine-and-a-half-hour delay. And if the economy passengers had to board through the first-class cabin, the figure spiked to an eightfold increase. That awkward walk past “first class” citizens subtly makes us more likely to want to destroy the class system all together. To have a mid-flight French Revolution and line up the elites at the guillotine. So, yeah, we all care and are all affected by cues around our social rank and influence. But most of us suppress the revolutionary, Che Guevarra-like instinct this can incite. Instead, we feign that we’re above the subtle status reminders we face every day. We soothe ourselves and undercut the high-status people by telling ourselves things like,...