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

by Michael Easter

book by the philosopher Elijah Millgram called The Great Endarkenment,” said Nguyen. “Millgram argues that the problem of our era is information overload and having experts

Enter games. This is why games are so powerful and why we play them. “Games are a balm for the confusion and anxiety of real life,” said Nguyen. “They give us a little world where we can manage and understand everything. We know exactly what we are doing and why we are doing it. And when we are done, we know exactly how well we have done. Games offer us a momentary escape from the confusion of the world.” They do this with those, as he put it, “point systems that are incredibly narrow, incredibly simple, and incredibly crisp.”

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.”

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,...

But our minds always look for the relatively minor differences we have with others and form our sense of self and societies around those differences. “People come to define themselves against their neighbors,” Graeber and Wengrow wrote.

But consider the “potlatch,” a practice by American Indian tribes in the coastal Northwest. To understand it, imagine you get invited to a big dinner party. But beforehand, the host asks you for your income and title at work. Then, when you arrive at this party, your seat at the table, the food you’re served, and the silverware you use to eat it with are all based on your income and title. So you, an accountant, are sitting somewhere in the middle of the table, eating New York strip steak and a baked potato off Costco china with a stainless steel knife and fork. Meanwhile, your neighbor the tech investor is eating Kobe beef with lobster risotto and using gold-plated silverware. This is upsetting. But, hey, look on the bright side. At least you aren’t the public school teacher at the end of the table eating a hot dog and store-brand potato chips with your bare hands off a paper plate. This sounds awkward. Cruel, even. But this is exactly what the potlatch did. It was a spectacular display of social ranking celebrated with a massive feast where people were seated based on rank. Their social rank determined everything from the food a person ate to the dishes and silverware they used to eat it. The leader who threw the party would even make a big speech about his influence and then overwhelm his guests with gifts as a big flex of status. Sort of like how the first-class passengers get champagne, a hot meal, and a special welcome across the in-board PA system while the rest of ...

Tracy told me that we have a whole toolbox of emotions that depend entirely on other people’s thoughts, feelings, or actions. Emotions like embarrassment, guilt, shame, jealousy, envy, empathy, and pride don’t work in a vacuum. These emotions are tools that compel us to work with others (or not) so we can thrive in our environment. So we can retain and advance our place in society. Let’s call these our “influence emotions.” Scarcity brain craves influence because the more influence we have over others, the more likely we are to survive and spread our DNA. Influence got us better mates. It increased our odds of survival in a conflict. It got us a bigger share of scarce resources. It even helped us get out of crappy menial work that burned energy. As long as humans have been around, Anderson said, influence has been like a vitamin or toxin. “People’s subjective well-being, self-esteem, and mental and physical health appear to depend on the level of status they are accorded by others.”

Status ponds are more important than we realize. How we feel at any given moment is surprisingly linked to the pond we’re in. For example, research shows that people in the top one percentile of wealth—one percenters who make at least $600,000 a year—frequently complain of feeling poor and stretched. This is because they usually live around other one percenters. So they focus on what they don’t have compared to their peers. It leads these objectively rich people to believe that they are subjectively poor.

Pride is the emotion we feel when we evaluate ourselves positively. “Pride feels great,” said Tracy, “and as a result of it feeling great, we want more of it. So we’re motivated to go out and seek more achievements or behave in more ways that help us attain pride, which is really just a way of saying we do more of the things that make us feel like we’re getting social status.” But Tracy’s research shows that there are two types of pride. One has a bright side; the other has a dark side.

The first type is called “authentic pride.” Authentic pride is good. It’s the type of pride we feel when we achieve something great and deserve that pride. For example, closing a big deal we’ve worked hard on, finishing faster than we expected in a 10K race, or creating something of value. Tracy said, “We feel authentic pride even if no one sees what we’ve done. But if someone happens to see the great thing we did, then it feels extra good.” Authentic pride boosts creativity and long-term mental and physical health and gives us lasting influence. Then, in the shadows, is the second type of pride: “hubristic pride.” Hubristic pride is undeserved pride. It’s a type we project without accomplishment. It’s the type of braggarts, self-aggrandizers, narcissists, and egomaniacs. It still gives us good feelings, “but the good feelings from hubristic pride come with problems,” said Tracy. “Hubristic pride leads us to behave in ways where the goal is all about getting other people to appreciate us.” It’s driven people mad and into self-destruction.

“But it’s a catch-22,” Tracy told me. “As you increase your status by letting people know you’re great, you simultaneously decrease it by letting people know you’re great. And that makes you look like a jerk. The much harder but more effective way is to actually go out into the world and do great things. And then status arises naturally.”

For example, a team of scientists at the University of Pennsylvania and UC Berkeley discovered that when we perform a task in front of others, we believe we’re being judged far more harshly than we are. We also think people take single moments of our lives and make sweeping generalizations. So let’s say we misspeak one line of an hour-long presentation. We afterward tend to believe that everyone in the crowd is not only mentally rerunning our mess-up over and over (just as we are!) but also thinking that we’re a terrible public speaker across the board. And because they think we’re a terrible public speaker, we assume they must also think we’re terrible at everything else in life. We’re laughably wrong. The scientists found that most people aren’t all that judgmental and quickly forget single errors. But because we overblow the implications of every social move we make—because we believe that everyone cares so deeply about our every public action—it causes us anxiety and stress. The scientists call this the “overblown implications effect.” It’s a wing of the “spotlight effect,” which is how we overestimate how much other people think of us. It’s as if we believe we were living in our own prime-time television show—The [Insert Your Name] Show—with the spotlight always on us. But the reality is this: we’re usually too blinded by our spotlight to stare at anyone else’s. There’s also what psychologists call the “fundamental attribution error.” It’s how we attribute other peopl...

About five years ago, my wife and I had a dumb argument. I wasn’t backing down. She wasn’t backing down. It was as if we were both sipping strong cocktails of the fundamental attribution error, overconfidence effect, and naive cynicism. During the stalemate, I vented to this friend. I explained to him in agonizing detail why I was right, why my wife was wrong, how the world would be better off if I could just get her to understand this—and did this guy have any advice for convincing her I was right? His response: “Do you want to be right or happy?” This question has since saved me a lot of headaches my ego-driven brain manufactures and seems intent on worsening by defending its position. And it highlights something important about our scarcity brain and its desire for influence.

When we ask ourselves, “Do I want to be right or happy?” we take the long view and insert perspective into the equation. But we can also bend the question. It could be “do I want to look good or be happy?” Or “do I want to one-up this person or be happy?” Or “do I want to be right or be a good friend, co-worker, or significant other?” And on and on. Play with it. Choosing the latter option can be uncomfortable in the immediate short term (we’re fighting against our pit bull brain). But over time, it has a way of dissolving the bullshit that causes our everyday suffering. And when bullshit dissolves, it becomes fertilizer, bringing growth. “Do I want to be right or happy?” can even give us perspective and clarity to see another important fact: We probably aren’t right in most arguments. And neither is the other side. Time changes our worldviews. Most of us can look back on past arguments and realize that there are very few where we were totally, undeniably, universally right. We overreact more than we underreact—another tendency that helped us survive in the past. Like a smoke alarm. It rings the same whether the smoke is from lightly burnt microwave popcorn or a massive blaze.

There’s something else humans are built to crave. And if we believe the statistics, this scarcity loop is killing one of us every thirty-four seconds.

But through basically all of time, the food we hunted, pulled, or picked from the earth wasn’t that rich and calorie dense. It wasn’t just scarce in quantity. It was also scarce in calories, tastes, textures, and all the other qualities that make food more enjoyable. We were eating plants we found and animals we hunted and fished. Remember: dirty roots and some slimy fish cooked over an open fire. Our modest diets weren’t all that craveable.

Food became cheaper. In 1920, Americans spent more than 40 percent of their income on food. By 2020, the figure was 8.6 percent.

All our food choices have also made us persnickety at the table. Laudan said, “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,” she said. “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 first is that having stuff helps us survive. The scientists explained, “In the past, owning the right goods at the right quantities provided protection, comfort and greater capacity to trade for other needed goods.” It’s probably best to think of these items as “gear” rather than stuff. Gear has a clear utility. Gear like tools, shelter, and weapons helped us accomplish life-giving tasks. The same rule applies today.

The second reason we like material goods is that they can bring us status. Having the right stuff for our time and place can boost our social ranking. Certain goods serve not only their primary purpose but also a secondary purpose of telling others about our rank or place in society.

Third, we can use material goods to feel as if we belong. This is different from buying stuff to get status. The scientists explained, “The motive for status manifests itself in efforts to be above others within a group, whereas the motive to belong manifests itself in efforts to be with others in a group.”

But for nearly all of time, we could have only so much stuff. The materials we needed to make our stuff were harder to extract, and shaping our goods by hand took much longer. For example, it used to take a blacksmith one minute to forge a single nail. Nails were so scarce and valuable that arsonists would often burn down buildings just to steal nails. Today, modern nail-making machinery can crank out 360 nails in one minute.

But the eighteenth century marked the beginning of the end of that. In 1733, the Englishman John Kay invented a weaving machine. It doubled the rate at which a textile worker could weave. But that didn’t just mean we started getting more textiles. Kay’s invention began a domino effect. It increased the demand for yarn. To keep up with the demand, we realized we needed to make a machine that could make more yarn. This then meant we needed a machine to get more cotton. Then a machine to make more machines. And on and on. One machine would increase the productivity of one industry so much that it would spur other industries to invent or adopt new machines to supply demand. And so on down the line until all industries were cranking out materials thanks to mechanization.

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.

Today the International Shipping and Packing Association, the trade group for moving companies, says the average American home contains about ten thousand pounds of stuff. That’s spread across anywhere from ten thousand to fifty thousand items light and heavy—from pens to TVs. The Wall Street Journa...

Psychiatrists first started noticing compulsive buying among the rich in the 1930s. But now we don’t have to be rich to buy compulsively. The historian Jeannette Cooperman wrote, “Only in the twentieth century did people begin engaging in the ec...

The prominent American psychiatrist and University of Iowa professor Donald W. Black identified distinct phases compulsive shoppers go through. And they echo the scarcity loop. First the shoppers look for good opportunities—places with frequent sales or new items. Next is searching: they enter into the world of stores and malls or online shopping sites. Black noted that these shoppers usually look for unpredictable bargains. It could be a generic handbag selling for $30 instead of $60. Or it could be a luxury bag discounted for a limited time by 40 percent, down to $2,200. And so they buy it—then quickly start searching for the next item to buy.

Black wrote that people with compulsive buying disorder “describe [shopping] as intensely exciting.” And like addiction, it’s often a learned coping mechanism, wrote Black. “Negative emotions”—for example, depression, anxiety, boredom—“were the most commonly cited antecedents to [shopping], while euphoria or relief from the negative emotions were the most common consequence.” Black said our abundance of cheap items means the disorder affects low-income people just as much as it does rich people. And the quick repeatability is key, he explained: “Many compulsive shoppers buy in quantity.” Even our concept of “need” has changed. We like to think that necessity is the mother of invention. But the Pew Research Center pointed out that it’s actually the other way around. Invention is the mother of necessity. We invent something we don’t exactly need, but over time it begins to dominate our culture so much that we start to consider it a necessity. Like GPS, bluetooth, wireless headphones, remote controls, television, microwaves, and on and on. We shape our machines, and our machines shape us in a way that makes us increasingly reliant on them. The number of items Americans consider “necessities” rather than “luxuries” multiplies each decade.

Yes, even many dogs in the United States now have more possessions than Americans just a few hundred years ago. My wife and I don’t dress up our dogs, because animal cruelty is wrong. But the dog clothing industry alone is projected to be worth $16.6 billion in the next handful of years.

Unlike our ancestors, we aren’t forced to occasionally leave our stuff behind. To radically purge it. We cycle through and collect things across our lives. As Mary Oliver put it in her poem “I Own a House,” “I own a house, small but comfortable. In it is a bed, a desk…a telephone. And so forth—you know how it is: things collect.” Things collect, indeed. But our things aren’t collecting in small cottages, like the type Oliver lived in. The average home has grown 75 percent since 1910. It is now roughly twenty-five hundred square feet. In some cities, homes have tripled in size, like in my hometown of Las Vegas.

As industrialization swept the globe, our scarcity brain kept doing its thing, pushing us into more. We now all have so much shit that we have an entire industrial complex designed to help us manage all our shit. We buy books and watch TV shows that teach us the magic art of culling and organizing our shit. Storage units, discrete locations we pay for so we can hoard more and more shit, are not only a thing; they’re also one of the nation’s fastest-growing business segments. There are now more self-storage facilities in the United States than McDonald’s, Burger Kings, Starbucks, and Walmarts—combined.

UCLA scientists say part of the reason we tend to collect so much stuff is that we don’t have a biological governor that tells us we’ve overbought. If we’re eating or drinking, we frequently overdo it, but eventually we’ll fill up and have to pause. But this isn’t so with stuff (or influence or information, for that matter). We can always repeat. Quickly. And get a storage unit.

Here’s a good rule of thumb to help you decide whether to buy something new or donate an old item: decide within sixty seconds. The psychology researcher Melissa Norberg, who is the president of the Australian Association for Cognitive and Behaviour Therapy, wrote, “Whenever you find yourself taking longer than a minute to make a decision, it’s likely you are ...

In the United States, levels of six air pollutants including carbon monoxide and lead have declined by 77 percent since 1970. Meanwhile, our GDP and population grew by 285 percent and 60 percent, respectively. We’ve reduced our total carbon dioxide by 13 percent since 2007. That’s thanks to simple economics and smart government environmental regulations.

Not only are we using resources more efficiently, but we’re also seeing old innovations merge into one. For example, in one of my lectures, I show students a famous RadioShack advertisement from 1991. It featured all sorts of products on sale at the store: a computer, a telephone, a clock radio, a stereo, a calculator, a police scanner, a camcorder, a camera, a voice recorder, an answering machine, and more. And the original advertisement was, of course, printed in a newspaper. “All of those items have now vanished into smartphones,” explained McAfee. Put these two phenomena at scale and combine them with wise government interventions that reduced pollution and protected wildlife, and we’ve been able to improve the human condition while treading more lightly on the planet. We’re now consuming fewer resources, using less land, polluting less, and even bringing back species we’d nearly pushed to extinction. All as our population grows and living standards rise. McAfee said he’d bet that in a decade we’ll be using fewer resources than we are today, regardless of how much our population and economy grow.

The second problem is one that advancements like a better aluminum can and having a bunch of items merge into one can’t solve. It deals with the human condition. As we’ve become more comfortable and adopted more efficient technologies and stuff, we haven’t necessarily become more satisfied. Mental health issues are rising around the world. Many of these technological shifts are, in fact, causing our malaise. They’re disconnecting us not only from others but also from ourselves and ways of living that satisfy us.

“Abundance brings with it problems,” McAfee told me. “We should prefer those problems to the problems of scarcity, but they’re still problems.”

scientists say that because we have ample access to all kinds of resources, we default to solving problems by buying.

As the slope let off and the rocks transitioned to pines, Zerra was scanning for antlers and skulls. She told me she understands that working people face constraints. So this isn’t any sort of judgment. “If you were running a company or had a lot of family counting on you and wanted to get away but only had six days,” she said, “I can understand why you’d pay to get the most out of those six days. You’d end up buying the Happy Meal experience. You don’t want to plan and you don’t want anything to go wrong. You have limited time and you’re thinking of all the other responsibilities you have. “I get that,” she said. “But I just feel like money hasn’t served me in the sense of having better experiences compared to not having as much money. Money brings more control but also less adventure. When I start with fewer resources and materials, whatever I earn, whatever problem I solve myself, I enjoy every moment a little more than if I had unlimited resources. There’s something so freeing and incredible about it. The word ‘empowering’ has become kind of gross, but it’s empowering in a sense to know that you’re creating your own experience and that you’re relying on yourself. And then, when it’s over, there’s a greater sense of satisfaction because you’re like, holy shit, I just did all of that.”

I’ve developed a motto I now use for any tribulations I face: “No problem, no story.” Every story has a complication. A point where unplanned events make our life uncertain and challenging. If we shy away or pay to eliminate those, we remove challenge and gain certainty. But we also learn less about ourselves and don’t become the hero of our own journey.

Fall hoarding is a relaxed endeavor if it’s been a good summer for nuts and seeds. It’s like going to the Mall of America with friends and a fat wad of cash. The squirrels gather, saying hi to their squirrel neighbors as they do. They place all their nuts and seeds in a burrow and let it be as they casually add more to it. But the situation changes if it’s been a bad summer for nuts and seeds. Scarcity makes the scene apocalyptic. The squirrels become defensive and paranoid. They think their neighbor squirrels are trying to steal their stuff. They’ll fight with other squirrels over scarce nuts and seeds. And then, once they’ve amassed a large enough hoard, they’ll prepare for more conflict. They’ll stand like a bouncer at the entrance to their burrow, ready to defend the hoard. I spoke with Stephanie Preston. She’s a psychologist at the University of Michigan who has spent her career studying how animals and humans relate to their possessions. She told me that when facing a disaster that makes necessities scarce, we humans effectively become squirrels. “A good example is the pandemic,” Preston told me. The pandemic was like a very bad summer. At its onset, people panicked. Our first response was to hoard. Brawls broke out in aisles as people clamored for toilet paper, canned food, hand sanitizer, and more. And then, once we had the resources to weather the pandemic winter, we continued our squirrel-like behavior. “This is when we saw a trend of people worrying about gettin...

Then we got TV in the 1950s. It was the ultimate information portal. In just a decade, the average person went from watching no TV to watching five daily hours of it.

Then we got the internet. This altered the source of mass information. It no longer came from some broadcasting or publishing company on high. The internet allowed anyone anywhere with a modem to be a broadcaster or publisher. To fire information into the ecosystem that anyone could read, watch, or hear. The result: At the start of the twentieth century, humans spent no time taking in digital information. By the 2020s, the average person spent between eleven and thirteen hours of their day consuming information on-screen and through speakers. Now 40 percent of this content is “user generated.” It’s the YouTube and TikTok videos we watch, blogs and Reddit threads we read, and many podcasts we listen to.

Some scholars estimate that in one day we are now exposed to more information than a person in the fifteenth century enc...

One investigation discovered that minutes after a group of nine-year-old kids signed up for TikTok, the app was feeding them information that suggested that COVID was a genocidal conspiracy. Like, “Hello, kids! Here’s a dance video, and another dance video, and did you know that COVID was created in a secret governmental lab to kill you and everyone you love? Now please enjoy another dance video.”

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.

This “aha” feeling of clarity often comes with truly understanding something, but not always. We can feel clear on a topic and be kind of wrong or even wildly wrong about it. We’ve all experienced this more than we’d like to admit. Remember from Chapter 7 that people who felt 99 percent certain were wrong 40 percent of the time.

“It’s easy to make delicious food if you give up on its nutrition,” he explained. “The same happens with truth: it’s easy to make seductively clear ideas if you don’t care about truth and nuance.”

He told me that we should question any information that quickly and easily delivers us a sense of clarity. That “aha!” feeling. We should actually use that feeling as a cue to look for details for how the information might be wrong. Like metaphorically calling the Vatican, we need to be reasonable with this or we’ll go mad. But it’s critical for topics we want to understand.

Vande Hei told me the same. “I think this is where seeking out ideas that contradict your own comes in,” he said. “You don’t want to ...