The Happiness Trap: How Humans Became Terrified of Scarcity

Picture yourself at the top of a hill. You’ve just been hiking for an hour without any breakfast. From your backpack you pull out a piece of stale bread, some sweaty olives, cheese, and whatever else you managed to grab from the fridge before you left in the morning.

Now picture yourself at a lavish banquet buffet. Overwhelmed by choice, you fill up your plate with an incongruous assortment of world-class chef-created entrees. As you walk back to your table, all you can think of is “what if I missed something?” “What do they have at the dessert isle?” You begin to look left and right at other peoples’ plates as you inhale one mouthful after another without even looking at the food. You are tasting, but barely savouring.

For most of us, the humble meal at the top of the hill will forever be the most satisfying and memorable. And it wasn’t because of the view. It was because we were in a mindset of scarcity. Although it was a humble treat, the relative value we placed on it in our head was much higher than for the lavish buffet.

Both abundance and scarcity are highly relative mental states, defined by context rather than objective reality: the same exact meal can be considered humble in one place, culture or situation, and lavish in other circumstances. What matters is how we feel in each situation: when we sense that something is scarce not only do we place a higher value on it, but we seem to enjoy it much more as well. The excitement of the quest, the sense of gratitude, are all heightened when we are in a mindset of scarcity.

Scarcity is our natural mental state, but this all changed once industrial civilisation handed everything to us on a silver platter. In fact, we are happiest when resources are in short supply. Anthropologists and volunteers in third world countries never fail to mention how some of the biggest, widest, longest-lasting smiles they’ve ever witnessed were from people owning nothing and living in highly precarious circumstances. We are most content in a position of scarcity: when our choices are limited and we have to work for things, as opposed to when we are presented with infinite choices and infinite decisions. Retail shopping is one of the best examples of how overabundance can be a narcotic and a depressant at the same time, much like hard drugs. Retail spaces are designed to give us an instant feeling of overwhelming abundance: as we become confronted by a myriad of products, we immediately feel poor, stressed, and hopeless. We go into a shopping frenzy all the while feeling inadequate, anxious and depressed. As for the “shopping high” itself, it only lasts a few hours at most.

Similarly, social media bombards us daily with gigabytes of data, inducing the same feelings that the lavish buffet or curated retail space induced: fear of missing out, anxiety, greed, depression. Our economic system may be addicted to ever increasing quantities of data, but when it comes to our brains there are real world consequences: there is only so much we can handle before suffering the side effects of oversaturation, overexposure and overstimulation.

Neuroscientists now confirm that, the human mind may in fact be at its happiest during times of scarcity. Overabundance is detrimental to our mental health because our brain is optimised for a balance between abundance and scarcity. It has been found that when there is too much of either, our brain will compensate chemically by upregulating or downregulating its own neurotransmitters. In the case of too much joy and abundance such as in the case of overstimulation from drugs, alcohol, excess food, or a tech addiction, something peculiar happens: The brain begins to numb itself to its own “happy hormones” such as dopamine, in order to restore the balance between joy and pain. As it does, the individual will begin to consume even more food, drugs or other addictives in order to boost their dopamine. Their goal is to reach the previous “high”, but because their brain has now numbed itself to joy, they will need a much bigger dose. This cycle of overstimulation repeats over and over with a higher dose each time, leading to addiction. Depending on the individual’s genetic wiring and inherited brain receptors, this addiction can take the form of substance abuse, behavioural compulsion or other outlet.

The bottom line is that our brains are wired to operate at their optimum level when they have simple survival problems to solve, not when they are presented with a compendium of foods, drugs, data and decisions. We are not designed to handle abundance, and this is precisely why there is barely a human in the West today who hasn’t fallen into some type of unhealthy addiction or mental illness. The prevailing capitalist dogma of growth and consumption is leading to increasingly dense, complex, frenetic and hopelessly chaotic societies that we were never meant to inhabit, let alone successfully handle without compromising our well-being.

As perverse as this may sound, our brains are chemically wired in such a way that the happier we try to be, the more impossible happiness becomes. This is our own inbuilt warning to be careful what we wish for. Because as far as our neurotransmitters are concerned, happiness is one big poetic irony. For our brain, absolute happiness isn’t simply unattainable. It is a chemically unstable and unbalanced state. This explains why wealthy people are more likely to be ungrateful and often unhappy. They are not ungrateful because they are bad people, but because this is what happens when one is exposed to overabundance.

This also explains why addiction is a disease of the western world: where there is moderate scarcity, our brain’s neurotransmitters are in perfect balance. Where there is overabundance and overconsumption, our brain becomes unhealthy and falls into addictions. Overabundance and perpetual growth alter our brain’s chemistry leading to the worst type of unhappiness: when you “have it all” but simply can’t seem to be able to enjoy it.

Why did evolution design us this way? Because our natural environment was never one of abundance. We evolved to be seekers and foragers within scarce environments, not consumatronic zombies trapped in endless shopping dystopias. We are happiest when we are in search of happiness rather than when we find it. As they say, it is the journey which matters, not the destination.

Yet we became terrified of scarcity. For those of us in Western capitalist societies where the system constantly tries to tell us just how lucky we are, our so-called abundance is nothing but a constant oppression of product propaganda. Any scarcity in the market immediately becomes headline news as consumatronic zombies are unleashed in their millions to the supermarkets where they can fight cart wars over toilet paper. Promotional campaigns weaponize material insecurity making ample use of scarcity capitalism: fake closing down deals, limited time offers that go on for years, inventory clearance sales that never run out of stock, and exclusive VIP giveaway scams.

The tragedy of living in a developed nation is that happiness is nothing but a consumeristic trap engineered by an unhappiness machine whose very role is to make us feel insecure, unhappy, and incomplete. Even those who try to minimalize their life cannot avoid the complex existence of bills, taxes, obligations, surcharges, lists, tasks, traffic and hundreds of forms of control that ensure everyone is kept on a short leash as they ride the treadmill of work, consume, repeat. Disease rates are climbing higher in the West than many third world countries thanks to new mental and physical illnesses and scam healthcare systems that have colluded with pharmaceutical giants to monetise them. As people lose sight of each other in a whirlpool of data, the so-called abundant societies of the West are turning into endless loneliness deserts. One can instantly locate thousands of items in Walmart, but has to walk around the isles for hours before someone smiles at them or even acknowledges their presence. Human beings always become invisible ghosts in the presence of well-lit product placements, colourful brand logos, and product promotions.

Catering to our unhealthy addictions, our economies had no choice but to become addicts to natural resources, profit and growth. Our entire civilisation has accelerated towards a vomitous state of permanent gluttony supported by extraction and natural destruction. There is no doubt that this collapsing civilisation will reach absolute scarcity, but it seems that it will do so by going through all the classic stages of an addict: denial, excess, and overdose. Degrowth and scarcity are the only long-lost friends that can drag us out of this pit, but only if we make an effort to ask for help.

Listen to my brand new interview for the brilliant Post Growth Australia, a podcast I highly recommend. The interviewers have really taken the implications of my book Beyond The Petri Dish to another level

.