A review by sherif
Scarcity Brain: Fix Your Craving Mindset and Rewire Your Habits to Thrive with Enough by Michael Easter

Did not finish book. Stopped at 7%.

Hard Pass. It's not good. Honestly, you already know what the book will say, and you can stay in that knowledge without having to endure the painful writing and cringey analogies. Especially surprising that Easter is a professor of journalism, because the book reads like an LLM was told to write a book about evolutionary psychology but call it scarcity brain and make it go down easy. I knew I was going to bail, and I couldn't make it past where he claims that health trackers like WHOOP (which he mispronounces) 'and others like it which use untraditional methods to leverage the scarcity loop. The devices contain no concrete metrics that are predictable and easy to modify like step counts, instead they lean into the suspense of unpredictable rewards by giving users a different daily recovery score and strain score. What we do across the day alters these abstract scores in unpredictable ways.' He's basically pretending the scores are random. He's not criticizing the accuracy of the algorithms, he's pretending they're slot machines. Either it's very misinformed, or it's done in bad faith. Like I said, pass. You know what, read Why Buddhism is True by Robert Wright. A way, way better text on basically the same core truths.