Scarcity Brain

Points and gamification begin to remodel our experience, our behavior, and how we define success. “When you substantially change the goals of the activity, that changes the activity itself,” said Nguyen.

In the human brain less equals bad, worse, unproductive. More equals good, better, productive. Our scarcity brain defaults to more and rarely considers less. And when we do consider less, we often think it sucks.

“But when we try to gamify ordinary life,” said Nguyen, “we’re trying to impose clear values on a preexisting thicket of values, on a system that is very uncertain and complex.” We abide by silly rules in the name of arbitrary points for parts of life that aren’t silly and arbitrary. Nguyen continued: “So instead of figuring out why you care about

The more resources we could get, the more we could fuel the development of our amazing brains. The more our amazing brains developed, the more we could figure out how to explore new territories. This might be why still today walking while paying open attention to the world can enhance creativity, concentration, and understanding.

Third, the repetition could stop being quick.

But Maslow’s fourth rung of the hierarchy was a bit more controversial. It centered on what he called “esteem” needs. Maslow argued that we not only need to feel good about ourselves. We also need to feel as if others feel good about us. Maslow put it like this: “We have what we may call the desire for reputation or prestige, respect or esteem from

The scientists call this the “overblown implications effect.” It’s a wing of the “spotlight effect,” which is how we overestimate how much other people think of us. It’s as if we believe we were living in our own prime-time television show—The [Insert Your Name] Show—with the spotlight always on us. But the reality is this: we’re usually too blinde

This current manifestation of the internet and consumer technology is insidiously powerful because of the way that it can mimic these loops that evolved for other things and were necessary for our survival. They’re now essentially being co-opted by a sort of fake system. The tech systems have gotten so good at mimicking these ancient reward pathway

We prefer metrics. So our attention and values naturally shift toward what’s easily measurable at scale and away from all these other, more complicated things that matter more.”