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

by Michael Easter

Addiction is chronically seeking a reward despite negative consequences.

Addiction is not a choice. Instead, it’s a summation of repeated choices that make a different choice harder to make for environmental, biological, and historical reasons. It’s deep learning.

Consider that the world’s largest media outlets like the New York Times and the Guardian run nearly tenfold more headlines about cancer and twenty-fold more headlines about murders and terrorism. Yet the average American is 50 percent and thirty-eight times more likely to die of cardiovascular disease than of cancer or by homicide, respectively.

The results? If you give a human a cookie—or cheeseburger or royal blue yogurt or mashed potatoes injected with butter and cream and topped with thick salty gravy—we will eat more and more of those foods until we fatten up and die of heart disease. If you give a human plain yogurt with some berries—or plain potatoes, lean meat, or rice—we will eat just enough of those foods. We’ll be less likely to fall into a scarcity loop of food.

“People struggle to see through all the health marketing. But, usually, packaged ‘health’ foods are actually more processed, because it’s way harder to make a cookie taste decent if you’re not using flour, sugar, or dairy, or any of these things.

“You can’t see anything from a car; you’ve got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk, better yet crawl, on hands and knees, over the sandstone and through the thornbush and cactus. When traces of blood begin to mark your trail you’ll see something.”

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.

Research and common sense suggest it’s better to have one great friend you truly care about and can count on than a million mediocre ones.

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

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