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

by Michael Easter

To take a simple but omnipresent example, a recent survey found that the vast majority of people don’t go to a new restaurant before looking at reviews online. Our informavore brain kicks in, and we want to know everything we should expect and how we should order. So we consult an online middleman, like Yelp.

But the problem is that our middleman doesn’t always have our best interests in mind. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania called online reviews a dual-edged sword. In theory, they’re great if they can help us make more informed decisions. But the trouble is, they wrote, “there is a systematic problem with many online reviews—they tend to over-represent the most extreme views….This makes it hard to learn about true quality from online reviews.”

One of those rabid cult followers was Tsunekazu Ishihara, the head of the Pokémon Company. Pokémon is the highest-grossing media franchise worldwide, with more than $105 billion as of 2021. It’s generated more revenue than Mickey Mouse and Marvel and Star Wars. A partnership bloomed.

“We often don’t realize to what degree our behaviors are not explicitly conscious choices but are driven by these sorts of subconscious chemical actions that get hijacked,” Hanke told me. “It creates something that could potentially be called addiction. If you don’t want to call it that, it’s highly incentivized repeated behavior.”

Americans are seemingly most entranced by the scarcity loop of happiness. We now spend more money per capita than any other country on wellness products. After all, “the pursuit of happiness” is written into our Declaration of Independence as an “unalienable right.” We’ve basically written the scarcity loop of happiness into our defining document—keep pursuing and pursuing and pursuing.

Yet the data shows that we’re far unhappier than other developed nations. Each American generation is unhappier than the one that came before it, according to (rather depressing) new research.

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 mor...

He called this “proportion.” It’s the recognition that every human has different needs and temperaments. Most religions preach moderation or the middle path. But Benedict understood that “moderation” is different for everyone. Enough for one person might be too much for another might be too little for another. Benedict even taught that self-denial and going with too little often stirs up pride, a snooty “holier than thou” attitude. Having too much or too little, he believed, was a distraction from the ultimate goal.

Thomas Aquinas, the thirteenth-century Dominican monk and philosopher, put it this way: “Beneath the multitudinous and even conflicting desires of [people] we can see the one desire which gives unity and meaning, force and decision to all human desires. All [people] seek what they seek for one reason: they think it will satisfy them, they believe that the accomplishment of their desires will make them happy. “Happiness,” he wrote, “is the goal of all human activity. The search for happiness is the common ground on which all human desires, all human ambitions meet.” When a child looks longingly through a pet shop window at a puppy, she’s seeking the dog because she’s seeking happiness. When a miner toils in a coal mine, even though the work is harsh drudgery, he’s seeking coal because he believes his pay will lead him to happiness. When a sales executive strives to make the next big deal, she’s seeking a commission because she believes the commission will ultimately bring her happiness. When we take that second serving of food, troll someone online, click buy on Amazon again, or do anything at all, we’re taking that action because we think it will make us happy. When we fall into a scarcity loop, it’s for happiness. Even our worst ideas are a search for happiness.

Researchers in Singapore discovered that our definition of happiness might depend on where we grew up. The feelings people most cite as “happy” and the situations they say make them happy differ between cultures. The scientists found that in the West the themes that most appear when people talk about happiness are “peppy emotions like excitement and cheerfulness” and self-esteem. In the East, people reference “calmer states like peace and serenity.”

The catch is that today we don’t have as many threats to our survival. Our modern world has pushed abundance onto us fast and hard and taken care of our basic survival needs. Yet our brain still continually tosses out our happy feelings as if they were rotting garbage.

The economist Brad DeLong explains that before the Industrial Revolution the comfortable people of the world had to “attain such comforts…by taking from others, rather than by finding ways to make more for everyone.” In other words, if they wanted to be happy, they probably had to make another unhappy.

But today, DeLong writes, “less than 9 percent of humanity lives at or below the roughly $2-a-day living standard we think of as ‘extreme poverty,’ down from approximately 70 percent in 1870.” That figure is adjusted for inflation. “And even among that [poorest] 9 percent, many have access to public health and mobile phone communication technologies of vast worth and power.” We’ve turned incredible experiences into everyday features of living. DeLong writes, “So many of us have grown so accustomed to our daily level of felicity that we utterly overlook something astounding. We today—even the richest o...

The research consistently shows that money, power, prestige, food, drink, stuff, status—what Aquinas would call “worldly” pleasures, and what you and I might call the American dream—don’t typically lead to lasting happiness. For example, Americans didn’t get any happier from 1975 to 1999, even though they became 43 percent wealthier based on per capita GDP. Some evidence suggests that as we’ve had more opportunities for more of those things, we’ve become less happy. The United States experienced a serious happiness downturn starting around 2015. And the number of Americans reporting that they were “very happy” recently dipped to an all-time low in 2018, before the pandemic.

Perhaps our influx of more of everything we evolved to crave paired with our industrial happiness complex—obsessing about and pushing happiness—is making us feel as if any day that isn’t pure bliss were problematic and leading us to chase the wrong things. The U.K. neuroscientists write, “Pretending that any degree of [dissatisfaction] is abnormal or pathological will only foster feelings of inadequacy and frustration.” Given our wiring, they write, “dissatisfaction is not a personal failure. Far from it. [It is] what makes you human.”

just as pride comes before the fall, so does excess.

Four hours of focused work a day seems to be the sweet spot for productivity. Our greatest thinkers throughout history like Charles Darwin, Charles Dickens, Ingmar Bergman, and G. H. Hardy swear by four hours. “Four hours creative work a day is about the limit,” said Hardy, one of history’s greatest mathematicians. Science has proved Benedict and Hardy and all those others right. In the 1950s, a group of scientists surveyed a range of the country’s researchers about their work habits. They found, quite paradoxically, that more work didn’t lead to more productivity. The researchers who worked hard twenty hours a week pumped out the most scientific articles. They released double the number of studies than did their counterparts who spent thirty-five hours a week in the lab. But those thirty-five-hour researchers were far better off than the ones who spent sixty hours in the lab. The latter group produced the fewest articles. Follow-up research suggests that working four hours daily allows us to find the sweet spot between hard work and adequate rest. We can work intensely for four hours and get a lot of good work done. Less than that and we leave performance on the table. More than that and we become likely to overdo it. To get injured by physical work, to get burned out by mental work. And this cuts into our future workdays. The nice part is, we can sustain four hours of daily work seven days a week. And despite that whole rule about Sunday being a rest day, many monks work...

Work can express our relationship with the world around us. As such it will not always be rewarding, just as life isn’t. But if I believe [work] can be no more than instrumental (paying bills), I will never notice what else it could be. If I simplistically equate self-satisfaction with work’s value, I’ll miss what else work, even tedious work, can yield. Conversely, looking for deeper dimensions in work may motivate me not to be exploited on the job, not to over-work, not to reduce my life to how much I can accomplish or equate my [self-worth] with my work-contributions, earning power or talents. After all, I own none of those; they are visitors and they may not always call. A day will come when they visit me no more.

See, that’s the thing. No job is useless so long as you’re treated well and can realize that it’s probably helping someone somewhere.

Brother Lawrence explained the appeal of working with our mind and body when he said, “It’s an active rather than passive use of time and attention. Falling into the internet or TV is passive.” A manual hobby can create an abundance loop because it’s active and rewarding in a way that produces something tangible.

Going without for the sake of it, as one English bishop in the early twentieth century explained, is “a weakness, not a strength. The only purpose, the only justification [for going without]…is that [a monk] may be more free.” By detaching from material things, the monks are freer to attach to a bigger thing. If everything is everyone’s, nothing takes on any special significance beyond another tool for the job. It’s gear, not stuff.

I was enjoying learning more about Catholicism. The faith is the foundation of Western culture and its morals and myths, and I’d never cracked a Bible.

In her work Glittering Images, the intellectual and cultural critic Camille Paglia wrote, “Sneering at religion is juvenile, symptomatic of a stunted imagination.”

Scientists in Denmark tracked daily Google searches for prayer in ninety-five countries during the onset of the pandemic. The term hit the highest level ever recorded, growing 50 percent. The researchers say half the world prayed to end the coronavirus. They wrote, “The rise is due to an intensified demand for religion: We pray to cope with adversity.” Even atheists, the research shows, are likely to lean on prayer when under stress.

And this isn’t anything new. For example, after 9/11, 90 percent of Americans turned to religion. Even if we don’t pray regularly, we do in the foxhole.

“Prayer can only be done by humans,” said Brother Brendan. “We can get grace from prayer. It can benefit our souls directly. It can change our souls for good, so all that we do immediately afterward will hopefully be better for others and, in turn, for us. It can help us be less self-obsessed and focused on the bunker mentality.”

Silence is when we hear.

“It seemed so blatantly artificial. Nobody I worked with actually wanted to be in Midland. But the only reason they were was for money,” he said. The idea, Father Matthew explained, was that you would, until you hit sixty-three, do a job you didn’t want to do, in a place you didn’t want to be, so you could drive a car you paid multiple times the average American income for. And you would then show off that car to other people who were working a job they didn’t want to work, in a place they didn’t want to be, so they too could drive fancy cars.

I heard a creek in the distance as we lost elevation. “We can convince ourselves that worldly things will make us happy,” said Father Matthew. “When we get them, we feel good, but that happiness just doesn’t last. Then we search for the next thing. We live in a big propaganda machine convincing us that the world is all about us. I can’t tell you how many people I’ve seen who seem to have it all—a high-paying job, a nice home and cars, a spouse and family who love them—go through a midlife crisis and come here.” Sometimes the monastery holds answers. Sometimes not. But the important part is that they’ve started asking the questions and searching for what strange place might show them the light.

People focus too much on happiness. No one will ever be perfectly happy all the time because happiness is a moving target. It’s better to focus on things we know are good and seek them. Then happiness becomes a by-product. Happiness comes by putting everything else in order and subordinating it to the ultimate goal. For us that ultimate goal is seeking God.”

Occasional deprivation makes the ordinary feel extraordinary.

Modern research and thousands of years of wisdom indeed suggest that it’s hard for humans to see and appreciate our blessings if they’re always at hand. Purposefully going without can help us realize how great it is to have—to appreciate the wonders of our world of abundance. It’s an idea embedded in ancient mythology and most religions. Consider Lent, Ramadan, or Yom Kippur.

We could occasionally spend time in the wilderness, totally removed from modern comforts. Or we could pick a comfort or two and go without it for a while. It acts as a hard reset. Then, when we get those things back, we can truly experience how wonderful they are. Grat...

And we can even build this anticipatory support internally. “We’ve found that the people who live past a hundred and are exceedingly satisfied with their lives tend to be religious,” he said. “When all is gone, when all is lost, and not everything works for these people, they still have hope. They still have something they can seek solace in. It’s like a survival mechanism for longevity. God is something they can rely on, talk to, trust, and feel like is there for them.”

“There’s a difference between loneliness and solitude, and they’re often conflated,” said Bishop. “Solitude is purposeful and intentional.”

Edward Gibbon said solitude “is the school of genius.”

happiness is a moving target. We understand what makes some people happy, but not everyone. When we chase the newest thing we hear will make us happy, we make decisions off questionable and ever-changing data. It’s as if we were always overhauling our life to abide by the finding of the latest happiness study.

Father Matthew looked at the horizon and said, “We just put everything in our lives in order and subordinate it to our ultimate goal, which is seeking God. If you’re only focused on you and your happiness, you’re going to crush others, first of all, and you’re going to destroy your own happiness. The way we end up happy is forgetting about ourselves and loving God.”

So perhaps happiness is the dramatic effort of a long and hard walk with seemingly no destination. The terrain is rough and the weather isn’t always perfect. It’s a stroll into an abyss. But at some point along the way, by trying to make each step a bit less about our immediate desires, we realize we’re happy, even though the journey hasn’t ended.

The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien wrote of his experience as a soldier in Vietnam, “At its core, perhaps, war is just another name for death, and yet any soldier will tell you, if he tells the truth, that proximity to death brings with it a corresponding proximity to life. After a firefight, there is always the immense pleasure of aliveness.”

“We don’t read many books. We have problems. Books are for people who have relaxed lives.” We all cracked up laughing.

“You risk so much by hesitating to fling yourself into the abyss.”