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

by Michael Easter

When participants were more confident they’d be painfully shocked, they were less stressed than when they felt as if getting shocked were a coin flip. Knowing we’re going to get punished is less stressful than not knowing. Hence the phrase “just get it over with.”

Nguyen reiterated that modern life is one big circus of uncertainty. “What we should value is unclear. And our values are hard to balance,” he said. This uncertainty is stressful and uncomfortable. And it’s everywhere. Always. Everyday life is often the opposite of a fun escape. Rather, it’s something we frequently want to escape. 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.”

Research shows that tweets with strong moral emotions, like outrage, score the most likes, retweets, and followers. The scientists call this “moral contagion.” And, just like a virus, it is indeed contagious. This

Numbers have also captured how we view health. Our doctors ask us to be within a certain BMI, or body mass index. Using our height and weight, BMI scores us as being “normal weight,” “overweight,” or “obese.” Like grades, it’s helpful for quick and rough analysis. But the metric doesn’t capture our true physical or mental health status or all the intricacies of weight that can affect our health. For example, how much of that weight is muscle, where the weight is stored, or why we might want to be at a certain body weight in the first place. This often applies to other broad health metrics, like blood pressure and blood sugar levels. And we often receive treatments or insurance premiums we may not need based on these numbers.

Humans are social animals who evolved to vigilantly jockey for status, fret about what others think of us, and often do what we do and think as a reaction to others.

Maslow argued that we not only need to feel good about ourselves. We also need to feel as if others feel good about us. Maslow put it like this: “We have what we may call the desire for reputation or prestige, respect or esteem from other people, recognition, attention, importance or appreciation.” This

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, “that house is a monstrosity…money can’t buy taste.” Or “the plane lands at the same time for everyone.” Because here’s the more important thing: expressing that we care, ironically, is the worst thing we can do for our status. Nothing hurts our status more than letting others know we care.

a psychologist at Princeton named Susan Fiske started studying stereotypes. She found that stereotypes are one way the powerful exert control over the powerless. Her work “brought back the topic of social hierarchy more generally to social psychology,”

He found that people with higher status are generally happier and experience fewer mental and physical health problems like anxiety, depression, and heart disease. And those health differences aren’t due to the lower-status people having poorer access to health care. The same findings have been shown in countries with universal health care, where health-care access and quality are the same for everyone.

Of course, seeking influence isn’t bad. The reason we did it and still do it today is that it helped us survive and thrive. It can lead us to work hard, to be more generous, to do good and help others. But our drive for influence can also lead to vain, selfish, and destructive tendencies like over-competitiveness, overconfidence, materialism, aggression, and general misery. This is likely why social commitment was one of three compulsions the Buddha had to overcome to reach Nirvana.

In short, authentic pride comes from doing awesome things. Hubristic pride comes from falsely advertising ourselves.

There’s also what psychologists call the “fundamental attribution error.” It’s how we attribute other people’s actions to their character but attribute our actions to factors outside our control. When someone else is late to a meeting, they’re lazy. When we’re late, it’s because of traffic.

Or there’s “naive cynicism.” This one’s when we think everyone but us is selfish.

Back then we were far more likely to debate positions that really did affect our survival. Influence could mean life or death. But in our safe, comfortable world, most of our everyday disagreements are astoundingly inconsequential. Yet we don’t see this. We let our ancient drive to always look good and maintain influence walk us into anxiety, resentments, and misery. It hurts us in the long run.

Food Of everything we crave, food tops the list. We require a certain amount of food to survive. If we don’t get enough, our health goes all to hell. The same goes if we get too much. But for most of human existence, food was scarce. The trouble was always finding enough food. To improve our survival odds, our brains developed elegant machinery like the scarcity loop to help us persist in our searches.

The numbers are savage. In the United States, cardiovascular disease kills one of us every thirty-four seconds. Scientists at Tufts discovered that only 7 percent of Americans have “optimal cardiometabolic health.” Even the young are at increasing risk. About 30 percent of all heart attack patients today are between thirty-five and fifty-four years old. Now 40 percent of all people who die before turning seventy die of cardiovascular disease.

“Cardiovascular disease is a modern phenomenon and your lifestyle makes the difference in your likelihood of dying from it. And what’s good for your heart seems good for the rest of your body and preventing other diseases.” It all starts with what we eat. The

Scarcity brain evolved in a world where food was often in short supply. So it’s built to crave all foods, but especially foods that are packed with calories. The more rich and calorie dense a food, the more delicious it is. The more delicious it is, the more likely we are to crave it and, in turn, eat a little more than we need. Our body stores that extra food as fat. In the past, having extra fat was an insurance policy against starvation. Our bodies would draw on that fat to survive food scarcity. For energy when we couldn’t find food.

Until 1900, she said, meat was generally considered a treat. It still is in many low-income countries. Eating as much meat as the average American does today—twelve ounces a day—was only possible for kings and queens. In

World War II amplified food processing. It was a massive exercise in feeding millions of troops around the world. Small food corporations joined the war effort to help supply troops with long-lasting, transportable rations. They were General Mills, Kraft, Nestlé, Coca-Cola, and so on. After the war, with massive new production lines, these corporations turned their attention to feeding the average American. They leaned on advertising agencies to pitch their products.

By the 1970s, something had fundamentally altered our ability to find enough. “If you look at the pattern of obesity, we’ve been getting fatter for the better part of a hundred years,” said Stephan Guyenet, an obesity researcher and neuroscientist and author of The Hungry Brain. “But obesity accelerated in the ’70s, ’80s, ’90s, and through today. What caused us to start eating more? I think there are various explanations, but it clearly has something to do with our food.”

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.

So what accounts for the rise in obesity and its heart-stopping side effects? By the 1970s, our scarcity brain—which for millions of years tuned itself to a world of less food and less interesting food—was living in a world of abundance. Food engineered to lead us to eat more faster was everywhere and readily available to most Americans. And we ate it more often.

For example, candy sales hit a record during the pandemic. They boomed 15 percent. The candy trade group the National Confectioners Association wrote, “When times are tough, people turn to sweets to make themselves feel better. The pandemic not only gave people more license to buy goodies, it got them into the habit of buying them online and consuming them at home.”

“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. So I think the brain is getting impacted on so many levels: from a marketing perspective, but also because so many of our ‘health’ foods are hyper processed and therefore so easy to overconsume.”

“Ultra-processed foods are fine-tuned at multiple levels to make us eat more of them. Their flavoring systems are dialed into what lights up our brains and makes us want to eat more. The foods are also physically processed in a way that requires less chewing, making it literally easier for us to eat more, faster.

Abundance isn’t just an issue in rich countries, said Laudan. Globally, obesity has tripled since 1975. Today more than half of all nations have obesity rates over 20 percent. The world now has 400 percent more people suffering from the ill effects of overnutrition, diseases of abundance, compared with malnutrition, diseases of scarcity.

That’s another benefit of abundance: Food became cheaper. In 1920, Americans spent more than 40 percent of their income on food. By 2020, the figure was 8.6 percent.

mass consumerism. If the data is correct, impulse buying spiked during the pandemic and has remained elevated ever since.

It felt like the scarcity loop. I’d think of or see a product that I thought might improve my life. Then I’d search the internet for the right version of it and eventually stumble upon a winner. Then I’d repeat the cycle. The UPS lady and I were on a first-name basis. But because my new possessions accumulated and accumulated, they seemed to begin possessing me. For example, I was taking consulting gigs I didn’t necessarily want to, but felt I should to cover the ensuing bills and rationalize a purchase.

“All people are materialistic to some degree,” wrote scientists in the academic textbook Consumer Behavior. “People naturally yearn for more of whatever material resources are prized within their culture.” Indeed, despite feel-good, Disney-movie ideas about our ancestors being “one” with nature, taking only what they needed, the truth is often quite the opposite. Nature was often brutal and much more like a Tarantino film. To survive, we often had to be equally brutal. And it’s nearly always been better for our survival to have too much stuff rather than too little.

Anthropologists at the University of Texas believe our default is to collect more stuff rather than less. They theorize that there are three reasons humans evolved to love material goods. The first is that having stuff helps us survive.

The second reason we like material goods is that they can bring us status.

Scarcity and exclusivity are the secret sauce of luxury brands and selling stuff at a premium price. Scientists at Temple University discovered that scarcity cues, the belief that an item is hard to get or limited, outperform popularity cues, like advertising that an item is a best seller.

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.”

Consider brands like Whole Foods, Goop, Black Rifle Coffee Company, and Patagonia. Shopping and displaying the logo is as much a sociopolitical, in-group, near-religious act as it is buying food, supplements, coffee, or an overpriced puffy jacket. Humans have been stamping brands on items for at least five thousand years.

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.

A study in Frontiers in Psychiatry found that 6 percent of Americans suffer from compulsive buying disorder. Some studies suggest the number is 2 percent, while others believe it’s as high as 16 percent.

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.”

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.

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 at the University of Illinois and Johns Hopkins recently wrote, “Consumerism and over-acquisition have become the order of living and abundance has emerged as the norm, especially in the [developed] world.” The scientists say that because we have ample access to all kinds of resources, we default to solving problems by buying.

The takeaway: when stuff is abundant, we tend to fix any problem with more stuff. To buy and add. We’re more likely to use items as advertised because there must be some other gadget out there we can buy to solve our problems.

if we push back against our tendency to add—forcing ourselves to solve a problem with what we have—we’ll likely solve it better, more creatively and efficiently. Creativity and efficiency bloom under scarcity.

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 getting robbed of items like toilet paper or food,” Preston said. “So then people went and bought guns. There were a record number of guns and ammo sold and a record number of new gun owners. This is the exact same as squirrels, who hoard, then sit at the front of their tunnel home ready to fight off competitors.”

This trend got a lot of press. But what we didn’t hear of quite as often is another behavior trend. Some people reacted in the opposite way. Organizing, decluttering, purging, and making everything just so also spiked during this second phase of the pandemic. Squirrels don’t practice the magic art of tidying up. But we do. Donations to the Salvation Army doubled. The amount of non-garbage items people threw out from July through September 2020 in New York City rose roughly 10 percent.

No other species explores like humans. Most other animals commit to a range they’re built for and stay there from generation to generation. Even when other species migrate or disperse, they do so within predictable areas. For example, caribou don’t migrate to Miami. Penguins don’t march to Minnesota. Steelhead trout don’t swim to Seaside Heights, New Jersey.

Other research shows that infants and toddlers who are allowed to explore the world develop better and faster than those who are helicoptered and kept mostly in the same place. The explorer kids gain language and physical skills faster, build stronger immune systems, and better understand the world. They even sleep better.

Dr. Judson Brewer, a psychologist at Brown University Medical School, told me that as humans evolved, our scarcity brain developed a craving for information. Especially information that improved our life and increased our odds of survival.

We can now search for information and advice anytime, any place, up to the second, and spiral into an informational matrix—hoping to find greener grass. In a more controlled, comfortable, inactive, mediated setting.