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

by Michael Easter

Everyone likes to focus on developing good new habits. But I want to know how we can resolve the behaviors that hurt us most. Because here’s the thing: it doesn’t matter how much gas we give good new habits; if we don’t resolve our bad ones, we still have our foot on the brake.

Because here’s the thing: it doesn’t matter how much gas we give good new habits; if we don’t resolve our bad ones, we still have our foot on the brake. And I’d begun noticing a unique signature of the behaviors that hurt us most. We can quickly repeat them. The worst habits are things we can do over and over and over in rapid succession—eventually to our detriment. These behaviors are often fun and rewarding in the short term but backfire in the long run.

“You’re right that everyone knows the house always wins,” said Sahl. “But you’re asking the wrong question. You’re assuming people play only to win. Gambling allows us to experience risks and thrills, and that’s fun.”

The New York Times reported that Uber, as well as many gig economy companies like it, is “engaged in an extraordinary behind-the-scenes experiment in behavioral science to manipulate [drivers] in the service of its corporate growth.” Uber, for example, uses unpredictable rewards and suspense-inducing cues to nudge workers into driving extended hours and where the company wants them to be. It’s also leaning into the psychology of near misses. When a driver wants to stop, Uber will bait her with an opportunity, alerting her, “You’re just [insert some sum of money] away from making [some round sum of money]. Are you sure you want to go off-line?” For example, “You’re just $21 from making $250.” As the Times put it, the takeaway is that “pulling psychological levers may eventually become the reigning approach to managing the American worker.”

My experience is something similar on Twitter,” he said. “The first time or two I had a tweet go viral on Twitter, I found that I was starting to view the world through what would make a funny tweet. I would be walking around and thinking, but instead of following a thought into something richer and deeper like I’d normally do, my mind would focus on figuring out what a tweet-sized, funny thing I could produce around that thought that might go viral,” he said. “So Twitter was getting into my brain and how I think, seizing my motivation systems.”

“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 rain had shifted to a sprinkle. At one point, I kid you not, Brother Cajetan stopped shoveling and looked at me and said, “We do this out of love.” Paused, thought, and finished. “And to love is to be vulnerable, and to be willing to be wounded.” Then he just kept on shoveling as I stood like an idiot trying to peel back the layers of insight in that line.

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 realized that money was not going to satisfy my soul,” he said.