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June 5 - July 7, 2025
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.
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.
A scarcity cue is a piece of information that fires on what researchers call our scarcity mindset. It leads us to believe we don’t have enough. We then instinctually fixate on attaining or doing that one thing we think will solve our problem and make us feel whole.
We’re still compelled to eat more food than our bodies need. To impulsively search for more information. To buy more unnecessary stuff. To jockey for more influence over others. To do what we can to get another fleeting hit of pleasure. To fixate on getting what we don’t have rather than using and enjoying what we do have. We have a scarcity brain.
Common sense dictates we will quickly stop doing something if it gets us nothing. A century of psychological research also backs this up. For example, if we turn the key to our car and the engine doesn’t start, we might turn the key a handful more times. But if nothing happens, we’re not going to keep turning and turning the key. We’ll give up and open the hood or call a tow truck. Psychologists call this stopping of unrewarding behavior “extinction.”
the human brain doesn’t experience that result as losing 50 cents. It tends to ignore the dollar invested and perceives this as winning 50 cents. Casinos call winning less than we bet “losses disguised as wins.”
The behaviors we do in rapid succession—from gambling to overeating to overbuying to binge-watching to binge drinking and so much more—are powered by a “scarcity loop.” It has three parts. Opportunity—> Unpredictable Rewards—> Quick Repeatability
Humans evolved to cover great distances looking for something to eat. In the past, we’d typically walk or run between five and thirteen miles a day while hunting and gathering. This was effectively the ancient form of picking up groceries. Except we often had no clue where food was. So we’d search and search the land. These ancient searches were like playing a modern slot machine.
Once we know something is pleasurable or rewarding, dopamine is primarily released when we’re pursuing and anticipating receiving that pleasurable thing, not when we’re actually receiving the pleasurable thing.
Research from Deloitte found that ads embedded with unpredictable rewards increased customer engagement by 40 percent and yielded a sevenfold conversion rate.
A recent study suggests the analysts are correct. It found that the most unpredictable and contentious politicians on both sides got the most engagement on news sites and social media.
In the end, he said, our life is ultimately a collection of what we pay attention to.
This hook-then-charge model, the Nielsen report predicted, will become a rule in the future. “The reach and influence…in this emerging area is a tantalizing opportunity for brands that should be too good to pass on!” the report stated.
In the human brain less equals bad, worse, unproductive. More equals good, better, productive. Our scarcity brain defaults to more and rarely considers less. And when we do consider less, we often think it sucks.
Recall what the father of American psychology, William James, said about how our life is a culmination of what we pay attention to.
Utah, for example, has one of the highest prescription drug abuse rates because Mormons aren’t allowed to drink alcohol or coffee or use nicotine.
Addiction is chronically seeking a reward despite negative consequences.
Research shows, for example, that most crack users in the 1990s were white, but 90 percent of people sentenced for crack possession were black.
“How do you help patients who come to you with addictions or even compulsions around other habits?” “My main advice is to make a big change,” he said. “Change your circle. Go to school. Educate yourself. Get a job or change your job. Take courses to improve your skills. Learn to read and pour yourself into books. Actively go out and make friends or change your friend group. Make big changes.” Embrace short-term discomfort to find a long-term benefit.
The point is to go through a set of clear and artificial rules that make reaching the goal a righteous pain in the ass. So much so that the reward of a win is unpredictable.
“One of the biggest transformations in my life as a philosopher and how I think about the value of games came from a book by the philosopher Elijah Millgram called The Great Endarkenment,” said Nguyen. “Millgram argues that the problem of our era is information overload and having experts who are extremely hyperspecialized.”
Political Twitter became 23 percent more toxic across the decade. And this is because, the researchers wrote, “uncivil tweets tended to receive more approval and attention [measured by] large quantities of ‘likes’ and ‘retweets.’ ” The scientists also noted that once the politicians got a rush of likes and retweets from a mean tweet, they became more likely to boost their future tweets’ meanness.
When we stamp a simplified scoring system on an activity, we begin to fixate on the scoring system and chase points rather than experience the activity’s original goals.
“We get satisfaction in exchange for shifting our goals along engineered lines but risk losing sight of the real importance of the activity. It bends toward something much more impoverished.”
Embracing the gray and wading into uncomfortable water to figure out why we’re doing something in the first place, and what all those somethings really mean to us.
one percenters who make at least $600,000 a year—frequently complain of feeling poor and stretched. This is because they usually live around other one percenters. So they focus on what they don’t have compared to their peers. It leads these objectively rich people to believe that they are subjectively poor. Other research shows that our desire for influence is also at the root of violence. A large study of inner-city crime in Detroit found that the most common reason one man killed another wasn’t over money, drugs, or girlfriends per se. It was over status threats.
“naive realism,” the belief that we see reality as it is. Nope. We don’t.
In the United States, cardiovascular disease kills one of us every thirty-four seconds.
Negative information, the scientists believe, triggers our brain to unconsciously assume a famine is nigh.
UCLA scientists say part of the reason we tend to collect so much stuff is that we don’t have a biological governor that tells us we’ve overbought.
The psychology researcher Melissa Norberg, who is the president of the Australian Association for Cognitive and Behaviour Therapy, wrote, “Whenever you find yourself taking longer than a minute to make a decision, it’s likely you are trying to find a justification for making an unnecessary purchase or keeping an unneeded item.”
The scientists say that because we have ample access to all kinds of resources, we default to solving problems by buying.
“No problem, no story.”
We often use stuff to fill an emotional impulse or advertise to society that we’re a certain type of person. Or it solves a perceived problem we could have solved better with a bit of creativity.
Newborns, for example, scan and visually explore new scenes for far longer than old ones. This helps brain development. 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.
Edward Abbey wrote, “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.”
Consider, immediately after the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings, researchers from the University of California, Irvine, investigated two groups. The first group was made up of people who watched six or more hours of televised bombing coverage. The second group was people who actually ran in the 2013 Boston Marathon. The finding: The first group, the bombing news bingers, were more likely to develop PTSD and other mental health issues. That’s worth restating: people who binge-watched bombing news on TV from the comfort of home had more psychological trauma than people who were actually bombed.
One investigation discovered that minutes after a group of nine-year-old kids signed up for TikTok, the app was feeding them information that suggested that COVID was a genocidal conspiracy. Like, “Hello, kids! Here’s a dance video, and another dance video, and did you know that COVID was created in a secret governmental lab to kill you and everyone you love? Now please enjoy another dance video.”
One study asked two groups of people to find information. The first group could use the internet, while the second used printed encyclopedias. The internet group—not shockingly—found the information quicker. But soon after the task, they scored significantly worse on their ability to recall the information accurately compared with those who used the printed encyclopedias. The study suggests that if we want to better remember information, searching for it more labor intensively, like finding the right book, then finding the right section in the book, can be advantageous. Just as slow food has
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When we take that second serving of food, troll someone online, click buy on Amazon again, or do anything at all, we’re taking that action because we think it will make us happy. When we fall into a scarcity loop, it’s for happiness.
The Greek philosopher Seneca said happiness is “[enjoying] the present, without anxious dependence upon the future.”
Benedict’s philosophy on life can be summed up by the phrase “ora et labora.” That’s Latin for “pray and work.” It’s the motto of Benedictines.
“Four hours creative work a day is about the limit,” said Hardy, one of history’s greatest mathematicians.
There is, apparently, an expression in French to describe the work style here. It is “un travail de bénédictin.” It means “a Benedictine labor.” It describes, as the academic and essayist Jonathan Malesic put it, “the sort of project someone can only accomplish over a long time through patient, modest, steady effort. It’s the kind of thing that can’t be rushed….It’s work that doesn’t look good in a quarterly earnings report. It doesn’t maximize billable hours. It doesn’t get overtime pay.”
“If you can keep moving and navigate your environment, that leads to more life satisfaction.
