The Hard Problem of Scarcity

I've been noticing myself on a downward spiral in the last 2 weeks, and regardless of my sense of self-awareness and current systems, I seem to be rapidly digging myself further down a hole.

What's Going On?

Backstory: I am a business coach and deeply enjoy partnering with leaders to build scalable businesses and healthy cultures. I spend most of my time thinking about how to build generative learning organizations. I engage primarily with founders/CEOs (and their core teams) and work with them on their mental models, and through them, the shared mental models with which their organisational systems are created.

The work I do takes years to show scaled and tangible results; there are no shortcuts and few short-term dopamine hits. Also, I cannot take credit for the final outcomes - my job is to nudge, share, and influence. I do not run these organisations or make final decisions. That said, I have had the incredible privilege to work alongside some phenomenal leaders in the consumer tech industry.

Over this past year, I moved out of Gurgaon, where I worked for over a decade, and started traveling within India and abroad, remotely coaching founders of various organisations. I have also been dabbling in pro-bono work on coaching to learn how I can work with leaders from different industries, as well as countries.

Additionally, in the last year, I have also been conducting pro-bono workshops on Systems Thinking based on a framework created by the Centre for Systems Awareness with schools, colleges, startups, accelerators, etc., in India, the UAE, some countries in Europe, and will host my first workshop in the US early next week. (Why - having employed these frameworks at work and in life since 2016, I've witnessed their transformative impact within the context of building scalable businesses as well as my own personal evolution and that of many other individuals).

This past year has taught me a lesson in patience that I hadn't anticipated. Every conversation regarding these FREE workshops has taken 3-6 months to set things in motion. The buy-in, in many cases, has been lukewarm, and the expectations of me delivering a workshop on something as nuanced as systems thinking within 60-90 minutes have been mind-blowing.

After spending months delivering these pro-bono workshops in different cities and countries where the intent to leverage the concepts was low to moderate, I ended up mostly burned out at my uncle's house in Maryland at the end of November.

Vision:

Short term - Write a book on actionable takeaways on the intersection of the Bhagavad Gita (specifically based on Chapter 3) and Systems Thinking. My aim was to ship the first draft of this book by 14th March in time to wrap up the 75 Hard challenge.

Mid term - Create a tool that helps capacitate most organisations to start functioning like learning organisations - by solving for the foundation of transparent structures of information flow and building on top of it.

Long term - Facilitate widespread global literacy for Systems Thinking and Self-Management (Sovereignty, thank you Jo?o (Jay) Machado ) by creating access to frameworks and tools that allow more people to see, sense, and think in systems, and own their individual and collective outcomes in life.

Current reality:

On short term vision:

I started sincerely working on the research for the book on the 1st of January. We're at the end of February, and by now, I expected to have made significant progress. I spent the first month since the end of November just resetting and getting into the zone to be able to study - preparing to start the 75 Hard challenge (2 workouts, no intoxications, waking up before 5 am - setting the stage for clarity and focus) on the 1st of January onwards. Over the past ~2 months, I've been reading, researching, and collecting dots. I started writing more sincerely on the 1st of February to connect the dots I was synthesizing, but my writing has taken a turn I did not anticipate.

I wanted to focus on Chapter 3, which is the Yoga of Perfection in Action, and while spending time reading and researching on it, I kept defaulting to spending more and more time on Chapter 2, which is the Yoga of Knowledge of the Self, i.e., who are we and what is consciousness. From there, I moved on to Chapter 7, Chapter 12, the Drg Drsya Viveka, The Ashtavakra Gita, Quantum Entanglement, Behavioral Sciences, back to Systems Thinking, Compassion, and Mindfulness.

Present:

I am writing, but it's not what or how I thought things would be shaping up. I understand that I don't owe a publisher a manuscript, a manager an update on performance, or an investor an update on ROCE. I work for myself and I own my time, and so in a sense, what I feel is a self-induced scarcity of time.

This sense of scarcity, coming from my ego or conditioning, is triggering my addictive behaviors - I am eating more, moving less, therefore becoming slower and more sluggish, putting me into a worse spiral with every passing day. Don't get me wrong, I'm doing the bare minimum - but that's not my scene. I'm a force of nature, high bars all the way kind of person, and just about meeting the floor is sending me on a pit-digging spree.

The Scarcity Brain

Evolutionary psychology and neuroscience offer a compelling framework for understanding compulsive behaviors, rooted in our ancestors' survival strategies. Our brains, honed in environments of scarcity and unpredictability, developed mechanisms to prioritize resource acquisition and consumption. This ancient wiring, while once advantageous, now presents significant challenges in our world of relative abundance.

1. Reward system sensitisation: The brain's reward system, particularly the dopamine pathways, evolved to reinforce behaviours essential for survival, such as eating and reproductive activities. In environments of scarcity, finding food or other scarce resources would trigger a strong reward signal. Today, this system can be easily hijacked by substances (like drugs or sugary foods) or behaviours (such as social media use, sex, porn, gambling, people pleasing, mindless activity at work) that provide an artificial, yet potent, reward signal, leading to addictive behaviours especially given how much easier it is for us to get into states of amygdala hijacks now than ever before.
2. Hyperbolic discounting: Our ancestors often faced "now or never" scenarios, where the immediate acquisition of resources was a matter of survival. This led to the development of hyperbolic discounting, a cognitive bias where immediate rewards are heavily preferred over future rewards, even if the future rewards are larger. This bias can contribute to impulsive decision-making and difficulty in delaying gratification, traits commonly observed in addiction.
3. Negativity bias and loss aversion: The brain's tendency to prioritise negative information and the fear of loss over potential gains (loss aversion) was beneficial in scarcity-driven environments where avoiding danger often meant survival. However, in the context of modern-day stresses and anxieties, this bias can drive us toward short term thinking, poor decision making and addictive behaviours as a coping mechanism to temporarily alleviate the fear of missing out or get a quick dopamine hit.
4. Mismatch with modern environment: The modern environment, characterised by easy access to food, information, and various forms of entertainment, presents a mismatch with our brain's wiring for scarcity. The ancient mechanisms that once ensured survival now contribute to maladaptive patterns in an environment of abundance.

Even in a world where physical resources are abundant, many of us experience a psychological sense of scarcity—whether it's time, social connections, or financial security. This scarcity mindset can trigger stress responses and decision-making patterns rooted in our evolutionary past, driving behaviors that may lead to or exacerbate addictions.

Problem of Addition

Last night I was listening to Michael Easter on Rich Roll where he talks about his book the Scarcity Brain - a fantastic podcast - where, in addition to a lot of relevant information (incl. the scarcity loop - opportunity, unpredictable rewards, quick repeatability), he touches upon our proclivity to add to the problems.

The "hard problem of addition" is not just about the arithmetic of adding more to our lives in terms of substances, behaviors, or material possessions. It's about understanding why we're drawn to these additions in the first place and the complex interplay between our biological instincts, psychological needs, and the socio-economic systems that exploit them.

This problem is deeply rooted in our evolutionary history, where our ancestors lived in environments of scarcity and had to maximize resource acquisition for survival. These instincts, however, become maladaptive in a world of abundance, leading to compulsive behaviors and addictions.

Problem of Addictions

Earlier today I read a post by Nir Eyal

I responded to his post with these comments - I was listening to a podcast with Whitney Cummings last June where she beautifully defines codependency (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Km8Nvmq8kF0). She also talks about recovery and goes on to say these words - 'I think a lot of my destructive behaviors stem from growing up in an alcoholic home - behaviors that helped me survive as a child. The people pleasing, the mothering, micromanaging, self-depriving control, addiction, perfectionism, the overachieving.' And I thought to myself - those could be my words. That's my story.

I've been struggling with distractions, overeating, and lethargy over the last 2 weeks and reflecting very deeply on this.

I am a recovering addict (codependency, food, perfectionism, the overachieving - nature keeps evolving) - I, like a lot of people (a lot more than we imagine to be true), had a traumatic childhood and have been people-pleasing or in codependent relationships for most of my life. I moved on from a very long relationship last year and have spent most of my time since then unlearning old patterns of being and behaving.

While I have made significant progress, it's now like a game of whack-a-mole. My current understanding is that the path for addictions gets narrower as we continue to do the work. Establishing boundaries often means creating distance between oneself and what's familiar. Rewiring hard-grained patterns can be way more painful than we are able to understand upfront. But there is no possibility for change unless we are willing to face the current reality of where we are at and confront limiting beliefs that are holding us back. I'm sharing this here because, for my own sanity and well-being, I want to destigmatize the need for these conversations.?

I think it's time we stopped looking away from broader societal and individual struggles with addiction and compulsive behaviors - whether it's to food, substances, or patterns of behavior. We also need to reflect deeply into who defines addiction and the spectrum of behaviors from mild to severe compulsions that qualify as addictions.

Possible Path Forward

My therapist said something to me in 2020 that has become a centering and grounding mantra for me since - Self-acceptance > Self-improvement.

We cannot improve what we cannot accept.

While we do need to create systems that help us in cutting off cravings, letting go of attachments to the past, present, and future, and in pursuing a path of mindfulness and detachment from desires, we also need to create opportunities to surface the scale and reality of how many of us these behaviors affect.

Understanding the brain's wiring for scarcity can inform strategies to mitigate its maladaptive effects. This includes developing mindfulness practices to increase awareness of impulsive behaviors, creating environments that reduce exposure to addictive triggers, and fostering social connections and community support systems that help address the psychological and social dimensions of addiction.

One of my motivations for sharing these posts every day is to continue to surface my current understanding based on the dots I am collecting and connecting in the hope that someone, somewhere will point out errors, challenge arguments, demand more clarity, and in general complain about anything that strikes them as amiss (borrowed from Daniel Dennett).

And I am sharing this also because I know how much work I've done over the years to let go of past traumas, to reparent my inner child, to face destructive patterns of behaviors, to surface mental models inherited and assumed, to forgive people and, most of all, to forgive myself for how I traumatized others by virtue of internalizing my own trauma.

I'm sharing this because I know I'm not there as yet, but I know I'm taking the smallest step I can to move in a generative direction as often as I can.

Practice of Loving Kindness

I was introduced to this practice by Nithya Shanti early last year and it has since been my go to centring exercise.

May I be happy. May be truly happy.

May I be happy for good reasons, for wholesome reasons, for healthy reasons and may I be happy for no reason whatsoever. No matter what we've done. No matter what we have left undone. We are worthy of happiness.

May I be truly happy.

Thank you for reading this. I hope this helps you in taking the smallest next step possible too.