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

by Michael Easter

By 1850 a full industrial revolution was taking hold. As we began figuring out how to make stuff faster and cheaper, our environments of scarcity, which we’d been in since our genus Homo split off from chimpanzees about 2.5 million years ago, began shifting to those of abundance. If we were to open our closets to Martha Jefferson today, she’d be shocked. 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. But mechanization, of course, didn’t just give us more clothes. It gave us more of everything.