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

by Michael Easter

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

scientists from some of the world’s most elite institutions like Harvard Medical School, King’s College London, and Oxford recently gathered to study online brain. They say that the internet has altered our minds in three ways. First, it hurt our ability to focus.

The second effect of online brain is that we’ve off-loaded some of our memory to the cloud.

Third, the scientists say, the internet is changing social interaction. Our brain seems to respond to social interactions online and in person similarly.

“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.

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.

Benedict realized that we’re all seeking happiness. That’s the capital G Goal underlying all our actions. It drives scarcity brain. It drives the scarcity loop. But our common tragedy isn’t that we can’t find happiness. It’s that we look for it in all the wrong places. We look for it—as Benedict noticed in Rome—in material possessions, power and respect, or fleeting pleasures like food and drink. We fall into a scarcity loop believing that this time the slot machine symbols will align and we’ll score a permanent win.

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.”

And how you experience happiness is constantly shifting across your life based on all sorts of factors seen and unseen. Where you were born, who raised you, what you do for work, whom you hang out with, and so much more. Every moment, thought, and action affects it. So perhaps it’s best that we can’t give happiness a firm definition. Considering the elusive nature of happiness, the scientists wrote, “a state of contentment is discouraged by nature because it would lower our guard against possible threats to our survival.”

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 produce enough food, shelter, clothing, and stuff that no one has to be hungry, wet, cold, or without necessities (and when people are without those necessities, it’s usually a problem of distribution and politics). Yet scarcity brain, as those U.K. neurologists found, still craves and clings to emotional swings. It can’t sustain happy feelings.

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.”

This regimen of finding and doing with enough, Benedict taught, allows us to focus on what truly matters: time where we discover that something larger than ourselves isn’t absent from everyday life. Benedict believed we find higher purpose and satisfaction in helping others, experiencing and making creative works, learning new things, balancing time in solitude and with others, and awareness in nature. And, most important, contemplating whatever big eternal mystery we think is the Big Eternal Mystery and letting that guide us.

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.

One Benedictine described labor as a “call to awareness and mindfulness.” They wrote, 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.

By my late twenties, at the height of my drinking, a friend asked me about my thoughts on religion and God. I told him, and I quote, “If someone needs some set of hocus-pocus stories and rules and the promise of a good afterlife to be a decent human, that person sucks.” I said that as I was on my way to a bar to black out and burn down my life.

In my work and thinking, I now think of it as balancing science with soul. Too much science, and we lose the most important aspects of the human experience. Too much soul, and we can lead ourselves into delusion.

He then began echoing Thomas Aquinas. “This search for possessions or titles or money is all a search for happiness. We convince ourselves that this next thing or accomplishment or meal or drink or promotion or raise is going to make us happy,” he said. “And there’s nothing wrong with any of these things. For example, if I have a drink to relax and to enjoy the company of some friends, that’s no problem at all. If I make a purchase that will help me accomplish a greater goal, that’s great. But these things can deliver a false and fleeting happiness. And we can chase that. Many people use these things and experiences to distract themselves and escape reality and numb something, and that’s destructive.”

Then he continued. “You’re going to die—you need to face that,” he said. “As healthy as you are right now, one day you won’t be. Your body will fade. Then what? You’re left with a soul. So you also need to focus on that. You need to find a deeper meaning. That’s the thing. 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.”

One monk told me that austerity and going without help them focus on what matters. And then, when they do receive a larger meal or other rare item that we take for granted every day, it becomes a blessing that they feel deeply grateful for. Occasional deprivation makes the ordinary feel extraordinary.

We can also get this from giving, said Bishop. “Giving something you have that others don’t is important for gratitude,” he said. “I’m a firm believer that the people who live long, good lives consistently devote themselves to service.”

Of course, God isn’t the answer for everyone. Not even close. But perhaps it all comes back to realizing that we aren’t the center of the universe. That there are things greater than us. We can’t necessarily quantify these things, and they aren’t found in fleeting pleasures or fame or followers or money or stuff or apps. Our well-being seems to be determined not by any one end point but by a rolling average of our actions. And also a willingness to explore our innermost selves rather than scramble after the next thing we think will make us happy. Spirituality counters what scarcity brain pushes us into and asks us to do the deep work.

The scarcity loop, as it too often exists in our modern world, has flipped. Today it pushes us into short-term comforts like mind-altering substances, online diversions, and acquisition. These things are all fine and fun used consciously and in moderation. But we can too easily escape into our modern scarcity loops too often for reasons other than fun—at the expense of long-term rewards, growth, and meaning. And that’s when the problems bubble to the surface.

We can reduce how frequently we buy by viewing our purchases through the lens of gear rather than stuff. It’s taking a utilitarian mindset and applying it to our current and future possessions to accomplish more of what truly enhances our lives and gives us meaning. Having items “earn their weight” and creatively solving a problem with what we have are deeply rewarding and often lead to better outcomes. Once we experience those rewards, the unpredictable reward a future purchase may bring becomes less alluring.

After analyzing thousands of years of mythology across cultures, Joseph Campbell explained the story like this: The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek. When I considered the experiences that most changed me for the better—experiences that made me more appreciative, present, empathetic, and helpful—all of them were difficult.