Future Here Now: Scarcity brain

Confession: I am a constant victim of scarcity thinking.

Because I grew up in an unstable economic situation (I tell this story in The Local Economy Revolution Has Arrived), the slightest money crunch triggers a panic in my guts that no rational information can overwhelm. Intellectually, I know where my finances stand, and I know that I’m not anywhere in the universe of real financial difficulty. But throw me a minor household economic glitch, and you can’t convince my lizard brain that total disaster isn’t right outside the door.

A therapist told me that this isn’t just bad thinking, it’s the way my brain wired as it was developing. A key part of my brain was formed in a particular moment of scarcity, and my paradgm, at a very fundamental level, is formed by that expectation of scarcity — no matter how much actual circumstances and my own intellectual understanding equip me to say otherwise.

Future Here Now is my 3x weekly newsletter focused on emerging trends that will drive our future in communities and organizations — and what we can do to become Future Ready.

But I can’t do this work without reader support.

To receive all new posts in their entirety, get early access to new materials and other free resources, consider becoming a paid subscriber.

Historically, this is the way most people lived. You don’t need any more than a cursory survey of history to encounter a near-universal parade of disasters and desperation. Scarcity has formed our lives for millions of years. It’s probably why we developed a biologiy that lets a 12 year old with a dad out of work morph into a middle aged adult whose stomach seizes up in the face of an unexpected bill. We believed it because a whole lot of the time, it was true.

But scarcity thinking also closes off our ability to see new opportunities — and in this transitional era, that scarcity paradigm can hurt us a lot more than it helps. Scarcity thinking compels us to cling to familar places, people, solutions (hoo boy does it), at a time when the old answers can be more dangerous than anything new we could try.

Maybe this is the most damaging part: scarcity thinking is almost purely driven by fear. Fear that might seem — and might even be — completely reasonable, in that moment’s context and in the light of our conditioning. But the messages of that fear, in a time of change and volatility, have increased odds of being wrong.

That fear-based reaction not only closes off our intellectual availability to new options, but it chokes our gut-level capacity to pursue new ideas. As organizational leadership researchers have shown, most change initiatives fail — and I think that’s because we keep approaching change intellectually, without addressing — or even acknowledging — our scarcity thinking, and our lizard brain fears.

Learning to manage our own lizard brains during a time of change may end up being one of our key challenges over the next many years. And to do that, we’re going to have to accept and learn to work with our lizard brains and their scarcity wiring.