Scarcity makes people mean
When everything is a zero-sum game, most of us lose
Never in my life have I been more mean than when I was very poor. Maybe it doesn’t do that for everyone, but it did for me. I can conclusively say that my poorest season was also my meanest. I’d been hardscrabble before, but during the nine months when I first lived in Seattle, on my own, were the hardest. And I became my worst self.
At the time, I chalked it up to being protective of my few resources, but really, when I was barely - and I mean barely - covering my basic needs, I also just became harsh and unkind and unforgiving.
There are these are moments that wash me a thick, intense shame. I remember them with a shudder, trying to shake them away. Walking past a man - he’s holding his shredded pants up over his skeletal pelvis with one hand and clawing at me with the other - and sneering.
I’m working all day today and again later tonight, why would I give you the change in my pocket?
Hustling home from work, intending to stop by one of my most reliable dumpsters before going back to my apartment which, at that exact moment, doesn’t have heat, and overhearing a rich girl talking on the phone about going skiing. Wanting in that moment to push her down and rifle through her gaudy Coach purse, knowing that the bag alone could feed me for a month. She can buy another one.
Like I said, I was mean. And I tie that meanness directly back to being poor.
I’m not telling you this to say a thing about bootstraps or working hard or the moral obligation to be kind even when the world is unkind to you. It’s also not to forgive people who have plenty and as still assholes. Fuck all of that. Instead, I’m telling it to you because I think it’s an important framework to consider as we try to determine why everyone is so unbelievably cruel to one another these days.
Your brain on scarcity
I’ve thought about this a lot over the years and I’ve come to the conclusion that when people are in fear for their resources - whether it’s money or property or political power or rights or love - they become hardened. We have a tendency to lower ourselves into a defensive crouch, protecting what little we feel we have left.
This is a documented pattern and one that should (but doesn’t) inform a lot of the ways we think about economic interventions. There’s a baked-in plea for help in the scarcity mindset, and it’s one that needs to be alleviated before almost anything else can be fixed. As the Cleveland Clinic explains, when “you’re constantly fixating on the things you don’t have, it prevents you from being able to solve problems, hold onto information, control impulses or simply be in the present.”
And it’s not just like, feel-good shit. There’s a demonstrable, cognitive change that happens when a person is experiencing a scarcity mindset. From a study published in the journal Psychological and Cognitive Sciences in 2019:
Neuroimaging results suggest that a scarcity mindset affects neural mechanisms underlying goal-directed decision making, and that the effects of scarcity are largest when they are compared with previous situations when resources were abundant.
Moreover, again compared with abundance, a scarcity mindset decreased activity in dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, an area well known for its role in goal-directed choice. This effect was predominant in the group of participants who experienced scarcity following abundance, suggesting that the effects of scarcity are largest when they are compared with previous situations when resources were plentiful.
Housed people may experience this when attempting to help - in a way they deem fit - someone who’s lived outside for years. When encampments are swept, housed neighbors will often wonder (or rage) on NextDoor about why the people living in the encampments wouldn't want to go into shelters.
Setting aside the fact that shelters are extremely unpleasant - loud, often plagued by vermin, segregated by the gender binary, may not allow pets, have regimented wake-up times that are often before the sun rises, do you need more reasons? - the psychological fact is that decision-making in people who are living in a scarcity mentality is just different than in those who have enough.
It’s the same reason people living in extreme poverty will often make a choice that makes sense in the immediate, but not in the longterm. And people with abundance just can’t, or shouldn’t, expect anything else.
How scarcity turns us against each other
The thing about scarcity is that it doesn’t matter how much or how little you actually have. Scarcity (like wealth, like fairness, like privilege) is subjective. And feeling scarcity does not mean that someone is experiencing scarcity. But it doesn’t matter because we all have our own level of comfortability.
When people feel unsafe - maybe because their local news has made them believe that they are, in fact, unsafe, in spite of literally every piece of actual evidence to the contrary - they experience a kind of scarcity. And this, in turn, makes it harder for them to understand the plights of others.
I’ve recently been considering this with regard to the right’s exceptionally creepy obsession with trans people. Like, even if we ignore the fact that most Republican moms from Ohio won’t likely meet a trans person in the daily life except the one who does their makeup at Sephora, they’re….really, really stuck on the very existence of trans people. And part of this, I think, has to do with the feeling that “they” (the “woke” people, which just absolutely kills me) are someone capturing and consolidating the rights of ~regular~ Americans. As though when we come for your parts of speech (how often do you even need to use a pronoun for a nonbinary person, Susan? Honestly) and protect trans kids, we are also coming for something that belongs to you.
I believe that a lot of people on the right genuinely feel scarcity about a sense of “normalcy” that they never had and were never owed to begin which. Like, the ability to never once consider whether the person at Applebee’s uses “she” or “they” pronouns was somehow a cognitive relief, and now they’re expected to use up precious resources in order to not be “cancelled” (no one is cancelling you and in fact no one is ever really cancelled, just ask Roseanne, who has a new FOX special).
However. The difference between people who have perceived scarcity of intangible ideals and people who are actually suffering from a scarcity of resources (including bodily autonomy, safety, and compassion) is astronomical. Because Susan gets to go home at the end of the day and stew in his hatred in front of a hot pile of Ricearoni with only half the seasoning packet used because little Brandleigh and Crandleigh don’t like it too spicy. No one is jumping Susan on her way home from work. No one is threatening to take Susan’s right to health care access.
And this, I think, is where we have to categorize scarcity - and try to reframe our own abundance when we can. Because that is how we become more caring, more empathetic, and more useful people.
The opposite of scarcity is abundance
Listen, scarcity is a reality for pretty much all of us in some kind of way. I feel it leaping in my chest every time I go to the grocery store and the shelves are empty because [insert combination of corporate greed and government subsidies and climate change here] and it feels like how I imagine the early days of “The Last Of Us” felt. And honestly, our corporate overlords love that for us because if we’re busy bickering over whether or not the M&Ms are a throuple, we might not notice that they’re getting fed off of our labor.
A lot of people are feeling afraid and like they don’t have enough of what they need -and they’re fucking right to feel that way. But it’s easier for them to take it out on drag queens because Tucker says so than to realize that Tucker and his weird creepy NPC family and the rest of the ghouls of right-wing media are the ones who are making us feel this awful scary feeling.
When I think about what we have in abundance, it’s pretty clear that it’s not tangible resources, like money. But we do have a lot power. And we do have a lot of heart. And we do have our own platforms. And we do have the love of our family and friends. And we do have our communities. And a lot of us might feel like we don’t have enough but we actually do.
If you feel yourself getting mean, check in and ask yourself - what do I feel like I’m losing right now? And am I actually losing anything at all? And if so, who’s really doing the taking?
When we realize which resources we do have, it’s a lot easier to calculate what to do with them.
be excellent to each other,
xoxo HBO
Couple o’ things I’ve been working on:
If you’re in one of the states which recently filed bills for localized wealth taxes, I highly implore you to reach out to your lawmakers in support. If your state does not have such a tax, you can reach out to your lawmakers and ask them why the hell not.
Here’s a piece I wrote about some oddly specific things that help me, a person with ADHD and thus OFTEN feeling like I’m operating with scarce resources, in my working life.
If you enjoy this newsletter, you might like my other one (I know, kill me) which is all about the history of mental health and some interesting/weird/upsetting things I find while doing other research.
And I’d be remiss if I didn’t plug my podcast, which is called Spotless and it actually is indeed about cleaning, but also about how cleaning is a nice thing to do or a curse and what it means for our brains and our lives. It’s a warm, welcoming space with no shame.