I am realizing that scarcity creates dynamism: you don’t get what you want enough, so you look after it.
Abundance creates the opposite: you have as much as you want, so you don’t look after it.
It becomes creepy, when you realize that knowledge is abundant as hell right now. Just look up your phone for anything you want to know. Anything. Therefore, no one does it.
For the actual digital natives (born 00s and up), knowledge (abundant) is boring. But rare skins (completely artificial scarcity) in a game is exciting to the point of spending hundreds of dollars on them. Even though those “skins” are just 0s and 1s hosted on a server.
I experienced irl scarcity as a kid. You had one magazine to read for a month, and that was it. Maybe two if you spent all your money on them. No videos.
We had the absolute necessity to simulate things in our minds, as you were looking at video games screenshots or pictures of basketball players, levitating in the air.
So, as a species we solved scarcity with abundance. But capitalism is sending us back to scarcity because abundance doesn’t create growth, which is the only metric capitalism cares about.
The complex part is that the way we feel about scarcity and abundance are directly the result of how we experienced them while growing up. It’s baked-in. We don’t really control this.
Brands know this, though. *breathing intensifies*