Chapter 9: The Scarcity Trap

There's a particular feeling that most people in midlife know well. It's the feeling that there isn't enough time. Not in the philosophical sense. In the Tuesday-at-4pm sense. Too many things to do, not enough hours, and a low-grade hum of anxiety about everything that's falling through the cracks.

Ashley Whillans, a researcher at Harvard Business School, has a term for this. Time poverty. And her finding is striking: feeling time-poor has a stronger negative effect on happiness than being unemployed. Eighty percent of working adults report feeling time-poor. Not some of the time. As a baseline state.

But here's the strange part. When researchers actually measure how people spend their hours, the picture doesn't match the feeling. People in developed economies have more leisure time than at any point in modern history. The time exists. It just doesn't feel like it does.

This is where Sendhil Mullainathan's work on scarcity becomes essential reading. Mullainathan, a behavioural economist, studied what happens to cognition when any resource feels scarce. Money, food, time. The specific resource doesn't matter much. What matters is the feeling of not having enough. And what he found is that scarcity creates a cognitive tunnel.

When you're in the tunnel, your attention narrows to the immediate shortage. You can see the deadline, the school pickup, the urgent email. You cannot see much else. Long-term planning degrades. Creative thinking shrinks. Decision-making suffers. And your bandwidth, the total cognitive capacity available to you, measurably contracts. Mullainathan's research found that the cognitive burden of scarcity is equivalent to losing roughly 13 IQ points. Not because you've become less intelligent. Because your brain is spending its resources on juggling rather than thinking.

The temporal effect of tunnelling is direct. When your cognitive horizon shrinks to the next task, you lose the ability to perceive longer stretches of time as coherent. The week isn't a week. It's a sequence of urgent moments. The month is whatever you can scrape together from the blur. You're not experiencing time in any meaningful sense. You're surviving it.

And here's the vicious part. Feeling time-scarce leads to worse decisions about time. You say yes to things you should decline because you can't think clearly enough to evaluate them. You skip the walk, the novel experience, the conversation that would have enriched your day, because there's no room. You defer maintenance on relationships, health, and rest, creating debts that will come due later with interest. The scarcity produces behaviours that deepen the scarcity.

Leslie Perlow, also at Harvard Business School, documented how this plays out in organisations. She studied a software engineering team trapped in what she called a "time famine." The cycle was self-perpetuating: time pressure led to crisis mentality, which led to individual heroics, which involved constantly interrupting each other, which destroyed everyone's productivity, which created more time pressure. Nobody was slacking. Everyone was working hard. And the harder they worked, the worse it got.

Perlow's intervention was structural, not motivational. She introduced "quiet time," blocks where interruptions were not allowed. 8am to 11am, no interruptions. 3pm to 5pm, no interruptions. The rest of the day, business as usual.

The results were startling. Productivity increased 59% during the morning block and 65% during the afternoon block. But the finding that really caught my attention was this: productivity also improved during the non-quiet periods. Once people had stretches of unbroken time each day, their thinking improved across the board. Their cognitive bandwidth expanded. They made better decisions. They were calmer. The time famine didn't disappear because they worked more hours. It eased because the structure of their time changed.

Boston Consulting Group, not exactly a company known for leisure, adopted the model across 32 offices in 14 countries. It worked there too.

This connects to something I feel in my own life. The problem isn't that I don't have time. On any given week, if I actually audit my hours, there's time in there. The problem is that I feel like I don't have time. And that feeling, which Mullainathan would call a scarcity mindset, reshapes my entire experience. It makes the available time feel thin, pressured, insufficient. And when time feels insufficient, I use it poorly. I reach for my phone instead of going for a walk. I choose the quick thing instead of the meaningful thing. I operate in survival mode when I'm not actually in danger.

The scarcity trap is, I think, the most underappreciated driver of time acceleration in midlife. Not because the science is obscure, Mullainathan's work is well known, but because nobody has connected it directly to the question of why years disappear. The connection is clear once you see it. Chronic time scarcity produces tunnelling. Tunnelling produces fragmented, shallow experience. Fragmented experience produces thin memories. Thin memories produce retrospective compression. And retrospective compression is the feeling that your years are shrinking.

It's not that time is moving faster. It's that your experience of it has been hollowed out by a scarcity mindset that narrows everything to the immediate.

Breaking the cycle doesn't require a sabbatical, though that wouldn't hurt. It requires a structural intervention. Protect blocks of uninterrupted time. Reduce the number of decisions you make each day. Create defaults so your routine doesn't require constant management. And, perhaps most importantly, confront the feeling of scarcity directly. Ask: is time actually scarce right now? Or does it just feel that way?

The answer, more often than you'd think, is the second one.