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August 15 - August 17, 2024
They’ve found that permanent change and lasting satisfaction lie in finding enough. Not too much. Not too little. Some have even flipped the scarcity loop to an “abundance loop,” using the loop to do more of what helps us.
Framing this as a “win” might seem odd. Totally dumb, even. But science going back to the 1950s confirms Redd knew something fundamental about human behavior. He understood that 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.”
Spin buttons let gamblers play the next game quicker. The average player went from playing three hundred games an hour to nine hundred.
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
“Gambling is so compelling because there is quantifiable risk associated with the reward,”
in slot machines, losses are mathematically far more likely to occur than wins, so you have fun, but the house doesn’t have to pay you anything.”
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.
The takeaway from all of these experiments is this: 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.
Eating this boozy fruit triggered what scientists call the “aperitif effect.” Studies show that people eat anywhere from 10 to 30 percent more food after drinking alcohol. So it compelled our ancestors to find and gorge more of the fruit to bulk up for leaner times. The buzz further rewarded us. Alcohol even kills germs. So this boozy food was less likely to contain bacteria that might make us sick.
Addiction, in other words, is a learned behavior that once worked well but begins to backfire. Using a drug or drinking still relieves discomfort, provides stimulation, and solves problems in the short term. But it starts creating long-term problems. The more often we repeat it, the deeper we learn it, the harder it is to break. Meanwhile, the problems pile up.
Addiction is not a choice. Instead, it’s a summation of repeated choices that make a different choice harder to make for environmental, biological, and historical reasons. It’s deep learning.
But once my run photos started racking up likes, comments, and followers, I found that my thoughts while running changed. It killed the meditative aspect of running. Instead of being present and unwinding, I’d be scanning for the right scene the whole time. I’d turn a bend in the trail and think, wow, that would be a great photo for Insta…”
“The best game developers were all saying that the most important tool in their tool kit was the point system. Because the point system sets the player’s motivations. It sculpts what you care about. What makes games work is point systems that are incredibly narrow, incredibly simple, and incredibly crisp.”
“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.”
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. This scarcity loop of constant unpredictable rewards and quick feedback ramped up their Twitter use and turned them into monsters.
They discovered that the chances of economy passengers spinning into a fit of anger were four times higher when the plane had a first-class cabin.
if the economy passengers had to board through the first-class cabin, the figure spiked to an eightfold increase.
Most of us will even take status and influence over money. One poll found that 70 percent of workers said they’d prefer a better title over a raise. They believed the better title would lead others to view them in a more respectful light and give them more influence.
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.
The scientists found that most people aren’t all that judgmental and quickly forget single errors. But because we overblow the implications of every social move we make—because we believe that everyone cares so deeply about our every public action—it causes us anxiety and stress. The scientists call this the “overblown implications effect.” It’s a wing of the “spotlight effect,” which is how we overestimate how much other people think of us. It’s as if we believe we were living in our own prime-time television show—The [Insert Your Name] Show—with the spotlight always on us. But the reality is
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“Do I want to be right or happy?” we take the long view and insert perspective into the equation. But we can also bend the question. It could be “do I want to look good or be happy?” Or “do I want to one-up this person or be happy?” Or “do I want to be right or be a good friend, co-worker, or significant other?”
“do I want to be right or happy?”
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.
Minnesota Starvation Experiment, conducted in World War II.
“We often don’t realize to what degree our behaviors are not explicitly conscious choices but are driven by these sorts of subconscious chemical actions that get hijacked,” Hanke told me. “It creates something that could potentially be called addiction. If you don’t want to call it that, it’s highly incentivized repeated behavior.”
Benedict put it this way: just as pride comes before the fall, so does excess.
See, that’s the thing. No job is useless so long as you’re treated well and can realize that it’s probably helping someone somewhere.
I told Father Matthew my thoughts about how all we really know about happiness is that constantly ceding to the next craving—what the monks here might call “worldliness”—seems to breed unhappiness over the long haul. Once we understand that, happiness doesn’t require as much as we might think. “You see it here, at this monastery,” said Father Matthew. “Look at all these young men here and the women at the convent. In spite of the austerity, in spite of the workload, in spite of all these things that might seem like a hardship and total waste of time, these people are all happy.”
But perhaps the biggest gap between modern happiness research and advice and the monks’ way of living lies in sociality. Or, rather, their lack of it. Yale University happiness researchers report that being around others is “a necessary condition for very high happiness.” Like, no social? No happy.
“Ask, what should I do with my life? Where am I supposed to go? What am I supposed to be doing? Who am I? What does all this beautiful order mean? Those are questions you have to ask yourself seriously and answer. You’re the only one who can do it. Ultimately, it’s you and something larger. That’s the drama of all human life. And it’s worth being a part of.”
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.
“You risk so much by hesitating to fling yourself into the abyss.”
