scarcity brain
fix your craving mindset and rewire your habits to thrive with enough
this was not as good as previous work. there was some meandering and, imho tedious, discussions. the ending, taking a trip to the monastery and the discussion re: the value of solitude was solid.
recommendation: possibly.
(from 2025 books)
highlights
Chapter 3: Where the Scarcity Loop Lives
“near-misses appear to have similar psychological and physiological impacts on Candy Crush players as slot-machine near-misses have on gamblers.”
“pulling psychological levers may eventually become the reigning approach to managing the American worker.”
Politicians will behave more unpredictably to get more media attention. The media, in turn, will run stories differently to grab public eyes. 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.
Chapter 5: Escape
“Problematic technology use is about the interaction between the product, the person, and their ability to cope with discomfort, and then a situation in their life that causes a pain that they’re not equipped to deal with. When you have the confluence of these three factors at the same time, it can create an experience you can put yourself into where tech products help you immediately forget about all your problems.”
Chapter 6: Certainty
In 2022, the executive editor of the New York Times told his journalists to spend less time on Twitter. The reason: Since the rise of Twitter, journalists were increasingly framing their stories not in a way that found balance, truth, and objectivity. They were framing their stories in a way that scored points with their Twitter followers, many of whom were fellow journalists rather than the public. This in-group point scoring was diluting the Times’s worldview. The public intellectual Bari Weiss, who worked at the Times, called Twitter the Times’s “ultimate editor.”
The list goes on. Researchers have found that quantification is changing everything from how we experience movies and music, thanks to the popularity of Rotten Tomatoes and Pitchfork; to sports, with the rise of moneyball analytics mostly ruining the soul and excitement of baseball; to art and the outdoors, with people flocking to museums and outdoor sites to take selfies for social media likes; to how chefs cook meals or how we design spaces to look good on Instagram or TikTok.
Chapter 8: Food
Pair our scarcity brain with the modern news cycle, the rat race of life, abundant ultra-processed food, and the limited-time release of the McRib. Congrats, you have an elegant formula for folks who waddle.
Chapter 10: Information
Research backs this idea. 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 advantages over fast food, slow information is often better than fast information.
Chapter 11: Happiness
Seneca said happiness is “[ enjoying] the present, without anxious dependence upon the future.”
We today—even the richest of us—rarely see ourselves as so extraordinarily lucky and fortunate and happy, even though, for the first time in human history, there is more than enough.”
Americans didn’t get any happier from 1975 to 1999, even though they became 43 percent wealthier based on per capita GDP. Some evidence suggests that as we’ve had more opportunities for more of those things, we’ve become less happy. The United States experienced a serious happiness downturn starting around 2015. And the number of Americans reporting that they were “very happy” recently dipped to an all-time low in 2018, before the pandemic.
Occasional deprivation makes the ordinary feel extraordinary.
Purposefully going without can help us realize how great it is to have—to appreciate the wonders of our world of abundance. It’s an idea embedded in ancient mythology and most religions. Consider Lent, Ramadan, or Yom Kippur.
Chasing human relationships for the sake of our own happiness can become its own hollow and pernicious scarcity loop.
If you’re only focused on you and your happiness, you’re going to crush others, first of all, and you’re going to destroy your own happiness.
Epilogue: What We Do Now
employers who throw unexpected special lunches for their employees generally get better feedback and more loyalty from workers than those who put special lunches on the calendar.