Getting Discomfortable with Scarcity

A few months ago, a listener from Europe reached out and asked me to do an episode about a topic that she described as “insatiability”, though she said it wasn’t quite the right word. The word in her native language doesn’t have an English equivalent, but after a back and forth it became clear that she was referring to that feeling we all experience from time to time of not being “enough”. For some people, myself included, this can be a persistent feeling of shame, “I’m not good enough”.

I also struggled to find the right word for this episode. While it has a lot to do with shame, I think this feeling is also really rooted in scarcity. The feeling that there is only so much human “worth” out there in the world, and if you don’t hustle to get it, and get it fast, there will be none left for you. I think this ties right into shame’s message that humans exist on a hierarchy of human value. If you can be “bad”, as shame suggests, then others must be “good” and therefore better than you in some way, which puts them above you on kind of a ladder of human worth. This whole notion that people can be inherently “bad” suggests that there is a scarcity of “good”, as if there just isn’t enough to go around. This misguided belief leaves us scrambling to get as much “worth” as we can, either by creating it, faking it, or stealing it from others. But fortunately, there is another way to look at the world!

I’ve been sitting on this request for months because I wasn’t sure I had anything insightful to say about it. But as always seems to happen, if I let a question linger in the back of my mind long enough it eventually bears fruit. What really inspired me to finally take a shot at it was a 2-day workshop I did last weekend on Mindful Self-Compassion. The course was designed and led by the Godfathers of scientific self-compassion, Kristin Neff and Chris Germer. It was a condensed version covering half of their pioneering 8-week course on mindful self-compassion. At its core, self-compassion is the realization that we can and should give ourselves the very same kinds of love, attention, and support that we would any other loved one, especially a child. This harkens back to my episode on family and my definition of adulthood (which I still haven’t achieved) as becoming your own parent. Like any good parent would do with their child, we should all be checking in with ourselves, showing compassion for our own pain, and offering unconditional loving-kindness to ourselves.

I think I’ll do a separate episode at some point all about self-compassion, but if you — like me and my European listener — struggle with scarcity and unworthiness, then I’ll leave you with this affirmation I came up with during a self-centered loving-kindness meditation exercise Chris and Kristin taught us (note: the fact that the phrase “self-centered” is pejorative in our culture illustrates exactly why a lot of people never engage in self-compassion to begin with). This loving-kindness affirmation is not a thoughtless mantra to be repeated over and over again, instead try saying it slowly to yourself a few times when you need a reminder that the feeling that you are “not enough” is just temporary, illusory, and not actually your fault:

“May I know that I am already everything I need myself to be.”