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

by Michael Easter

the brain of an addicted person still, in a way, views their drug use as a survival mechanism.

Addiction is chronically seeking a reward despite negative consequences.

essential problem people face,” said Nguyen, “is which experts and information do I trust and how do I figure out how and why to trust them?

humans hate uncertainty so much that we’d rather experience punishment.

The experience led me to a rule to guide my future purchases. I landed on “gear, not stuff.” Stuff is a possession for the sake of it. Stuff adds to a collection of items we already have. We often use stuff to fill an emotional impulse or advertise to society that we’re a certain type of person.

Gear, on the other hand, has a clear purpose of helping us achieve a higher purpose.

Benjamin Day started a newspaper. He was the first to realize that his “product” wasn’t his newspaper or the news. It was his readers and their attention, which he could sell to advertisers. He understood that the more readers he could gather, the more he could charge per ad.

The Greek philosopher Seneca said happiness is “[enjoying] the present, without anxious dependence upon the future.”

Dale Carnegie said happiness is something “governed by our mental attitude.”

For Emily Dickinson, it was “The mere sen...

“a state of contentment is discouraged by nature because it would lower our guard against possible threats to our survival.”

the point of work isn’t to finish it. It’s to do it.

“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.”

Occasional deprivation makes the ordinary feel extraordinary.

We can shift scarcity loops into abundance loops. That is, find hobbies that have the three parts of the scarcity loop but help us do things that are good for us. Like what Zerra does with her shed hunts or what Hanke did with Pokémon Go. Many activities in nature thrust us into the loop. For example, fishing, bird watching, rock collecting, and more all mimic the scarcity loop.