Ailments of Abundance, Cycles of Scarcity
This is the story of a society killing itself with excess.
Reinhard Grubhofer summited Everest but nearly lost his life in the process.
Grubhofer was a seasoned climber with three of the Seven Summits under his belt. His summit of Everest in May of 2019 marked his second attempt at conquering the mountain. Many of the other climbers attempting to summit that day were not as experienced.
He paid $65,000 for his journey to the top of the world. But an increase in Everest interest, partially from better distributed media, has created a business opportunity for aspiring guide companies. And some of those companies don’t maintain the same rigorous standards as the more expensive ones.
In his article detailing Grubhofer’s treacherous climb, Joshua Hammer reported that, “the industry had become inundated with inexpensive agencies that cater to budget clients.” One agency charges $38,000 for the trip – about half the price Grubhofer paid. The lower cost agencies handle more Indian climbers who typically can’t afford the higher cost trips that Americans and Europeans purchase.
The budget agencies also don’t vet the customers as well. Who wants to turn away an unqualified climber if he’s willing to pay?
And more Indian climbers are dying than any others. Of the 28 people who died on Everest and Nepal’s 8,000 meter peaks this year, 19 were Indian.
“New rules have to be implemented,” said Grubhofer, “to weed out the incompetent and the inexperienced, to reduce the crowds, to remove the Disneyland illusion and bring Everest back to something approximating its pristine state. Too many people, he says, have died needlessly because of sliding standards.”
With an abundance of demand, at least in the case of Mount Everest, has come scarcity in standards. But Everest expeditions aren’t the only example where we see ailments of abundance creating a scarcity of something else.
It’s a societal cycle. With abundance come unintended side effects. And those side effects result in the scarcities of other things - things often more damaging than the original problem.
Abundance of Food, Scarcity of Health
Barbara O’Brien traded the best days of her life for instant gratification.
She spends Thursday afternoons sitting on her porch swing waiting for her son and granddaughter to arrive. When they pull in the driveway, Maddy, Barbara’s granddaughter, jumps out of the car and runs up the porch steps, giving her grandma a big hug before running past her into the house.
Her son, Rob, follows a few steps behind, hugs his mom, then helps her up from the swing and into her motorized scooter.
He spends the evening mowing the lawn, doing the laundry, and tidying up around the house while Maddy plays on the floor and Barbara watches from her scooter, unable to help with anything.
Twenty years and 150 pounds ago, Barbara wouldn’t have imagined this fate. She envisioned herself playing dolls with her granddaughter on the floor and doing her own chores.
Unfortunately, ice cream became more of a habit than exercise. And moderation was more of an idea than a practice.
Now Barbara is obese, has diabetes, and struggles to walk more than a few steps at a time. Barbara is 65.
All ailments of abundance.
According to the National Institute of Health, nearly 40 percent of Americans are obese. Another 30 percent are overweight. Compare that to 14 percent of American adults who were obese in the 1970s, and the ailment of abundance is clear.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, nutrition problems could largely be classified as deficiencies. Diseases like pellagra, rickets, and scurvy are caused by dietary deficiencies in niacin, vitamin D, and vitamin C. But you probably don’t know anyone who suffers from these symptoms of scarcity.
Nutrition research and increased availability of nutrient dense food solved those problems. But after the problems were solved, food production didn’t stop. Almost all Americans, rich and poor alike, are never far from high calorie, sugar packed, processed food.
The ice cream consumption seems tame when you compare it to sugar. According to the Department of Health and Human Services, the average American eats 153 pounds of sugar per year. In the early 1800s, that number was less than two pounds per year.
We no longer ask ourselves where we’ll get our next meal, but rather how we can prevent overfilling our dinner plate. How we can cut out the excess sugar in our diet. Or how we can kick our McDonald’s habit.
Obesity costs the United States approximately $147 billion annually. Just as real but harder to measure are the quality of life costs for people like Barbara. Daily diabetic finger pricks, blood pressure medicine with unpleasant side effects, the inability to chase her grandchildren around the backyard – all ailments of abundance.
An abundance of junk is contributing to a scarcity of both longevity and quality of life. And junk applies to much more than food.
Abundance of Technology, Scarcity of Everything
Descending from the 40th floor of his Manhattan office, Simon Goldstein ordered a latte from his Starbucks app. Rather than engaging his co-workers with whom he shared the elevator, he scrolled some headlines.
As he entered Starbucks, Simon saw they were short staffed. The line reached the door. The wooden tables were full. And the pick-up area was packed with people only peeling eyes from their phones to check the counter for drinks.
Simon joined the herd, pulled his phone from his pocket, and scrolled Twitter until his drink was ready.
Cell phones killed conversation skills. A device designed to connect us had the opposite effect. People are less able to converse intelligently and more likely to choose an app over a conversation.
Wherever we go, we have an abundance of stimulation. You never need to make conversation to cull boredom. Riding an elevator or waiting for a coffee 20 years ago meant interacting with the people around you to pass the time. The more you interacted, the more your conversational skills improved.
With a scarcity of distraction, we defaulted to conversation. With an abundance of distraction, we hide from it.
Abundance of stimulation
The effects of cell phones on adults are scary. The thought of how they impact children, whose brains are still developing, is terrifying.
A study from the Journal of the American Medical Association reported the prevalence of diagnosed ADHD in US children increased from 6.1 percent in 1997 to 10.2 percent in 2015.
The study suggested further research to explore what caused the increase. I’m not a scientist, but these events might be related:
2004 Facebook launch
2005 YouTube launch
2006 Twitter launch
2007 iPhone launch
2008 Android launch
2011 Snapchat launch
In his TED talk on the brains of young children, Doctor Dimitri Christakis shared some startling facts and findings.
In 1970, the average child began watching TV at four years old. Today it’s four months.
The overstimulation hypothesis predicts that prolonged exposure to rapid image change during critical periods of brain development primes the mind to expect high levels of input, leading to inattention later in life.
Beginning in 2007, many parents began to carry what was essentially a portable television. A pocket-sized babysitter for any public situation where their children don’t want to behave.
Thus began the abundance of stimulation that led to a scarcity of concentration.
Christakis went on to explain for each hour of TV a child watches per day before the age of three, that child’s risk of having attention disorders increases by 10 percent.
But for each hour of cognitive stimulation (being read to, going to the museum, singing, etc.) a child receives before the age of three reduces that child’s risk of attention disorders by 30 percent.
His conclusion: children need more real time play and less fast paced media.
Why don’t kids play anymore?
Christakis isn’t the only person who shares this sentiment.
“I used to spend hours seeing how many jumps in a row I could get on my pogo stick,” my girlfriend fondly recalled of her childhood.
“My sister and I used to see how many passes we could make without dropping the lacrosse ball. And I would play the taste test game with my siblings. One of us would be blind folded while the others fed us bits of random food they didn’t think we could guess.”
But those days seem to be in the past. With technology, kids have shifted from production to consumption. They never have an opportunity to be bored, so they never feel the need to be creative.
The abundance of stimulation created a scarcity of creativity.
I have no science or medical background, but I have a theory about boredom. The more often children feel boredom, the less frequently they will experience anxiety later in life. With boredom comes the necessity to entertain yourself, to test your creativity, or to be comfortable sitting in solidarity with your thoughts.
With an abundance of stimulation, children aren’t forced to fill their time with play. They can take the path of least resistance and replace their boredom with screen time. Later in life, the learned behavior of “screen medicating” becomes a neurosis – the panacea adults turn to at any moment lacking stimulation.
Too many people have forgotten that we need moments without stimulation. Filling these empty moments with constant flashing lights, refreshing news feeds, and images of other people’s perfect lives creates a host of uncomfortable problems.
We can’t sleep. We feel anxious. We can’t focus long enough to form an opinion or work through a challenging problem.
This issue snowballs out of control and produces anxiety ridden adults from kids who never had to flex their creativity muscles.
An abundance of stimulation, a scarcity of mental health.
Information Abundance
Cell phones also eliminated what I call the crossword puzzle conundrum. I often work on crossword puzzles with my girlfriend and her dad. We have a no phone rule when working through the puzzle. Drawing from our unique experiences, we all answer clues the others don’t know.
We combine our answers and build out the puzzle. Then we talk through the clues that none of us knew individually. We ask anyone else in the room. Sometimes we call her grandparents.
Doing the crossword puzzle is a social activity because it’s a no-phone-zone. If we could Google the clues, we wouldn’t need to call her grandparents, ask her mom, or even talk with each other.
We would get all the answers every time, but we wouldn’t struggle, joke, laugh, learn or connect.
Real life situations don’t promote the crossword puzzle conundrum. With the abundance of information at our finger tips, we rarely have a scarcity of knowledge. Without a scarcity of knowledge, we have fewer reasons to interact, combine our experiences, and arrive at solutions.
An abundance of information creates a scarcity of connection, critical thinking, and original opinions.
Abundance of analysis
Paul Graham recently tweeted a business idea: “Now that formerly neutral(ish) newspapers of record’ have been forced to pick a side to avoid going out of business, there may be room for a new publication to serve that need.”
Graham is talking about a newspaper that simply reports the facts. Something like, “Impeachment hearings underway” rather than “Trump’s goose is cooked. He’ll definitely be impeached and here’s why.”
Or maybe, “Hurricane makes landfall in Florida killing seven people” instead of “Super Storm Such and Such destroys the coast – clear proof of global warming.”
Advertising spend in the United States is predicted to hit $240 billion in 2019. The abundance of ad revenue to be won necessitates 24-hour news networks. But there isn’t enough news to report facts 24/7/365, so the news channels provide commentary on the issues. And it doesn’t take a marketing genius to understand that outrage sells. Reporting nothing more than the facts doesn’t keep eyes locked on the screen and ad dollars pouring in.
Abundance of information brought with it a scarcity of critical thinking.
Abundance of Credit, Scarcity of Options
Morgan Housel has a great piece where he explains the trajectory of the American economy since the 1950s.
Through the abundance/scarcity lens, the post war United States had a scarcity of jobs to employ returning soldiers, so the consumer culture was born.
Americans went to work in factories producing consumer goods. Then they spent their paychecks on consumer goods. Wages increased nearly 200% between 1940 and 1963, and the gap between the rich and poor narrowed.
Americans could buy the same cars, washing machines, and televisions as their neighbors – and they had no trouble paying for it.
Jobs, consumer goods, and cheap debt were abundant.
But then, according to Housel, “between 1993 and 2012, the top 1 percent saw their incomes grow 86.1 percent, while the bottom 99 percent saw just 6.6 percent growth.”
In less than one generation, the average American could no longer buy the same things as their neighbors because some of their neighbors were making 10 times the money. But the average American was conditioned to believe they should have the same things, so they made up the difference with debt.
And where in years past, they had an abundance of income to service a reasonable amount of debt, they now have an abundance of debt and a scarcity of income to service that debt.
Because middle class Americans devote so much of their income to servicing debt, they’re unable to invest money in ways that will lift them out of the middle class.
According to a recent New York Times article, Americans making more than $340,000 per year devoted 6 percent of their incomes to education, but Americans making $40,000 - $60,000 per year only spent 1 percent on education.
Those same high earners spent an average of 20 percent annually on pensions and personal insurance – the vehicles through which generational wealth are built. But middle-class Americans devoted only 8 percent of their income to the same categories.
If the trend continues in this direction, class divide will continue to increase until the middle-class abundance of debt leaves them with no options other than to work until death.
Scarcity at its finest.
A story of debt abundance
From Housel again,
“Joe, an investment banker making $900,000 a year, buys a 4,000 square foot house with two Mercedes and sends three of his kids to Pepperdine. He can afford it.
Peter, a bank branch manager making $80,000 a year, sees Joe and feels a subconscious sense of entitlement to live a similar lifestyle, because Peter’s parents believed – and instilled in him – that Americans’ lifestyles weren’t that different even if they had different jobs.
So what does Peter do?
He takes out a huge mortgage. He has $45,000 of credit card debt. He leases two cars. His kids will graduate with heavy student loans. He can’t afford the stuff Joe can, but he’s pushed to stretch for the same lifestyle. It is a big stretch.”
Where the abundance of consumption and credit used to be a boon to the country, it’s become an ailment of abundance.
Among Americans carrying these types of debt, the average student loan balance is about $47,000, the average credit card balance is nearly $7,000, and the average auto loan is almost $28,000, according to Nerdwallet.
Carrying this level of debt leads to scarcity in many ways. Scarcity in options is most relevant:
No option to move out of your parent’s home.
No option to take a lower paying job that you enjoy more.
No option to have kids as early as you want.
No option to care for aging family members.
As Yuval Noah Harari observed in his book, Sapiens, “luxuries tend to become necessities and to spawn new obligations. Once people get used to a certain luxury, they take it for granted. Then they begin to count on it. Finally they reach a point where they can’t live without it.”
And when we can’t live without the luxuries, we can’t get off the hamster wheel that allows us to pay for those luxuries.
An abundance of consumer crap, a scarcity of time to enjoy it.
Where We Go From Here
Reinhard saw the abundance of demand cause a scarcity of safety on Everest. Barbara felt the abundance of junk food cause a scarcity in quality of life. Simon saw the abundance of technology causing a scarcity of connection. And Peter experienced the abundance of debt causing a scarcity of options.
But the stories of these people aren’t unique. Countless individuals in our society are facing the same ailments of abundance. And as a society, we’re going to feel the collective impact of the subsequent scarcity.
If we allow ourselves to continue down this treacherous path, our scarcities will combine to create the perfect storm of disadvantage. Like Barbara, Simon, and Peter, we’ll be a society of fat, anxious, lonely, and broke people. We won’t be able to think critically and form our own opinions. We won’t be able to defend ourselves or innovate, and we’ll quickly fall behind, if not on the national level, at least on the personal level.
And we can only solve these problems at the personal level. Ailments of abundance are ailments of choice. Society is altered when an aggregation of choices (or non-choices) alter norms. Choices are driven by awareness, experience, and critical reasoning. The critical reasoning piece can’t happen if awareness or experience is lacking, which occurs when we don’t pay attention or think for ourselves.
Ailments of abundance require habits and discipline.
With nutrition, we need education, role models, and self-control. Most people would avoid abundance by following Michael Pollan’s advice: “Eat food. Mostly plants. Not too much.”
We can combat information abundance and overstimulation with stillness. Take more walks, designate phone free zones, cultivate situations like the crossword puzzle conundrum. Don’t have children until you’re committed to playing with them rather than plopping them in front of a screen.
When it comes to money, we need to look not to our neighbors, but within. Do you need the new car to make you happy, or are you using it as a signal of happiness? Instead of buying stuff to make ourselves happy, we need to build a life that brings happiness. Fill your home with relationships, good conversations, and game nights, not possessions from Home Goods and Best Buy.
We also need to teach our children (and understand for ourselves) that if you can’t afford to buy something in cash, you can’t afford it. The age of abundant credit needs to end so we can experience an age of abundant options.
Finally, rather than addressing each ailment as it happens, we need the foresight to predict the next abundance and course correct before we’re in crisis mode. If we can adjust mid-cycle, rather than at the peak, we will have smaller swings from abundance to scarcity. We’ll have less turmoil in our lives and societies. And we’ll be much happier for it.
What is the next ailment of abundance we might face? I don’t have that answer. But if we’re not thinking about it, the pattern will continue – ailments of abundance and cycles of scarcity.
Acknowledgments
This piece was the product of a lot of help from others. Major thanks to my girlfriend, Ashleigh Stephan for help sorting out the concept, researching, and proofreading. I’d also like to thank Brad D’Antonio, Pat Dundon, Gary Applegate, Packy McCormick, and Ana Lorena Fabrega for reading drafts and providing feedback.
