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

by Michael Easter

it’s not as if the rest of the world were blissed out. All sorts of metrics suggest we are experiencing, as David Brooks put it, a “rising tide of global sadness.” Researchers in the U.K., for example, analyzed the lyrics of 150,000 popular songs released between 1965 and 2015. They wrote, “The usage of [the word] ‘love,’ for example, practically halved in 50 years.” The word “hate” didn’t appear in popular songs until 1990 and now finds itself in 20 to 30 hits a year. Similarly, the words “joy” and “happy” fell while “pain” and “sorrow” grew. Another group analyzed millions of news headlines and found that they got significantly more negative. Global unhappiness hit a record high in 2021. One extensive study found “negative feelings—worry, sadness, and anger—have been rising around the world.”