Day 236: Is Your Work a ‘Scarcity Loop’?

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

In Scarcity Brain, author Michael English describes a three-part cycle that human beings naturally get sucked into: (1) opportunity; (2) unpredictable rewards; and (3) quick repeatability.

Think slot machines, shopping, or monitoring Likes on your Facebook posts. Human beings, who evolved with a drive to find food every day in the wild, are drawn like moths to anything that offers those three factors. If products don’t already have these features, marketers will find ways to engineer them so they do.

outsmarting the Scarcity Loop

The key to defeating the power of the scarcity loop, English argues, is to acknowledge it. We can’t change milennia of genetic programming (at least not easily). But we can replace negative scarcity loops with positive ones in our lives.

English gives the example of a woman he knows who lives nomadically, owning only the items she can fit in a backpack and living in nature for long stretches at a time. She makes it a game to see if she can meet her needs with the items she already owns. Her “game” offers the scarcity loop — opportunity, unpredictable rewards, quick repeatability — but in a way that feeds her mind, body, and spirit instead of hijacking them.

work as a scarcity loop

As I listened to English’s conversation with Rich Roll, I found myself wondering, Why don’t I engage in any of these habits? I really don’t find myself overeating, overshopping, scrolling the internet. I really don’t think I have some kind of superhuman willpower. I’ve had some of these kinds of bad habits in the past. But now — nope. Not even the temptation.

Except … there’s one thing I do every day, as often as possible: WORK.

That may sound masochistic, but the thing is, I struggled for years to get to a position where my work represented my values and drew on my strengths. Now it does.

And there’s definitely a scarcity loop there. Plenty of opportunity to work when you’re a pro bono immigration lawyer and a law professor (no shortage there). Unpredictable rewards: some days I resolve the client’s problem, or find the perfect source for my research question; some days I come up empty. And quick repeatability: with the internet at my fingertips, I can almost immediately try a different approach.

identifying Positive and negative scarcity loops

For many lawyers, work can form this kind of scarcity loop. And that’s not bad; it’s biology. Our brains will look for these kinds of behaviors. The question to ask ourselves is whether the activity we’re using feeds us or drains us.

That’s a personal question that each of us has to answer for ourselves. But deep down, I think we know. We may like the money, status, or other rewards from our job, but that’s not necessarily a positive scarcity loop. If you don’t love your work but you still feel like you can’t stop doing it, you may be caught in a negative scarcity loop. But if you would do the job for free or for subsistence wages — if you would do the job even if no one recognized you for it — maybe you’ve found a positive scarcity loop through your work.

If so, congratulations — and keep doing what you do (even if it looks to other people like overwork). Sure, you need adequate rest to stay at your best, but you don’t need to quit or retire. You’d probably just end up spending too much time checking for Likes on your Facebook posts anyway.