3 Cultural Slogans that Virtually Guarantee Scarcity-Driven Thinking

How to break decades of imprints with a few simple shifts

Early in life, you got programming — whether from mass media, family members, or music — that now limits your creative and emotional freedom.

This programming creates blockages, inertia, and anxiety that prevent you from implementing creative projects, bringing in the levels of money you want, and other meaningful pursuits.

Whether they’re direct slogans or covert imprints, identifying and exploring the nature of your inner programming is fundamental to creating a life rooted in authenticity rather than mechanical and compulsive thinking patterns.

Cultural slogan #1: “Money doesn’t grow on trees”

This is an obvious one, but it operates on two levels. On one level, it implants the belief that money comes only from strain, toil, and hard work.

It also suggests that money, by its very nature, doesn’t flow naturally and bountifully but instead demands constant pain and vigilance to acquire and maintain.

When you tell yourself, however subconsciously, that success is a product of strain, you create blockages against the type of attention that is most conducive to real momentum.

And when you believe that money doesn’t flow bountifully and generously, you perpetuate emotions like frustration, boredom, and apathy, which limit your ability to access clear-minded and light-hearted focus.

How to plant money trees

If you think money comes from hard work alone, perish the thought. — Napoleon Hill

We do our best work when we become so immersed within it that we lose sight of the fact we’re working in the first place.

Instead of assuming that productivity demands suffering, I’ve found it powerful to see “hard work” as a gated garden that I must pass through to get into the states of mind that are truly conducive to creative momentum — such as flow, fun, and ease.

Typically, the hardest part of any task is getting started. When you start something, your mind skirts around the outskirts of what you’re trying to accomplish, and you’re marinating in your inner programming related to challenge, effort, strain, and the like.

This programming often casts a shadow that makes the work feel harder than it will when you’re knee-deep into it.

To interrupt your projections about toil and strain, I’d urge you to get curious about the concept of “fun.” Is fun confined to leisure, or does that represent just one small strand of it?

I always return to an insight in the book, Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life:

“Fun isn’t so much a feeling as an exhaust produced when an operator can treat something with dignity.” Ian Bogost

Often enjoying our work isn’t so much about being delighted by it. Instead, the work becomes fun when we do it from an angle that allows us to fully behold its significance.

That might mean becoming radically clear about why you’re doing a given task, possibly summing it up within a couple of sentences you can glance at while working. It can also be fun to gamify the process so that you enjoy the challenge of completing it within the constraints of your choice.

All of these tools make immersion in the task automatic. When you find a way to access intrinsic enjoyment in a task, you can uproot many of the problems that obstruct its natural flow.

Cultural slogan #2: “Accidents happen”

People sometimes use this slogan to make a person feel better after dropping a plate or spilling coffee on the floor. But it can also be a tool for explaining away negative experiences as random strokes of bad luck.

In this way, the phrase deflates our ability to identify the meaning in our experiences. The belief that events happen at random becomes a precursor to feelings of helplessness that readily mutate into scarcity-driven thinking.

“Accidents are no accident. Like everything else in our lives, we create them. It’s not that we necessarily say, ‘I want to have an accident,’ but we do have the thought patterns that can attract an accident to us.” Louise Hay

If you tripped and sprained your ankle, you’re free to reduce the problem to the fact you weren’t looking at the ground and tripped over loose gravel.But you can also reflect on the thoughts and emotions occupying your mind before the accident.

Then you playfully ask yourself if your tripping served as a wake-up call or a payoff to a dynamic in operation before the fall…

Why dispelling “accidents” from your life automatically reduces scarcity-driven perceptions

If you’re content to accept that accidents “just happen” and you’re the joyless subject to them, you get primed to accept other surface-level solutions to your problems.

This will encourage you to skip over the inquiry process that could lead to root-cause-level explanations that bring real relief and transformation.

For example, instead of wondering why you struggle to focus, you might immediately gravitate toward a stimulant or some other tool that helps relieve the problem in the short term. It may help at first but you can also fall into a cycle, both psychologically and physiologically, that leaves you feeling powerless without outside stimulation.

Refusing to look at the often-subtle roots of your problems and instead reaching for a quick fix can create a downward spiral of scarcity-driven thought and behavior patterns.

In Existential Kink, Carolyn Elliott suggests experimenting with the axiom “having is evidence of wanting” with everything you experience, no matter how gross, punishing, or appalling an event or circumstance appears to your conscious mind.

The notion (that having is evidence of wanting) comes from a perception shared by several different psychological folks — like Jung, Freud, and Lacan — that humans have a habit of taking a freaky enjoyment in the experiences and sensations they claim to hate.

Instead of saying your situation is a product of an accident or bad luck, ask yourself:

• Who would you be and what would need to be true if having actually were evidence of wanting?
• What message would your accident be imparting to you?

Keep in mind that an axiom is…

A self-evident principle or one that is accepted as true without proof as the basis for argument.

The point of this experiment isn’t to accept that “having is evidence of wanting” as absolutely factually legitimate.

But if you experiment with the insights that arise when you playfully agree to the idea, you might be surprised by what you discover.

Often, you may not experience an immediate flash of understanding. Instead, you’ll feel an opening that liberates you from the position of being a victim to your circumstances.

Cultural slogan #3: “If you do what you love, you’ll never work a day in your life”

This paralyzing slogan can corrupt you into thinking that passion should be your central guiding force.

The issue is the human mind is inherently fickle. Anything we do every day or semi-regularly won’t always feel good because nothing feels good 100% of the time.

Just as eating or drinking or strolling through the park isn’t always deeply satisfying, anything we commit to will occasionally feel laced with boredom and anxiety.

But if you believe that when you find the right pursuit then you’ll never suffer or struggle, you’re setting yourself up for shallow, half-hearted commitments.

How to love what you do even when you hate it

Exploring the science of procrastination led me to realize I’d been over-relying on my emotions as guides.

According to research published in the Social and Personality Psychology Compass, procrastination is a strategy for short-term mood and emotion regulation.

When we engage in a difficult task, we procrastinate when the pull toward an immediate reward out-competes our grasp on its long-term rewards.

It’s an intuitive yet liberating conclusion because it makes the urge to procrastinate less personal and less inditing.

When you recognize your bias toward immediate reward, you give up the idea that you’re struggling because you don’t love what you’re doing enough or because it doesn’t align perfectly with your values, or whatever.

Sometimes, procrastination can serve as a meaningful sign of misalignment, but it can also just mean the passion mindset trained you to believe you should be persistent because of your feelings rather than despite of your feelings.

Enjoying or loving something becomes a reward for sticking with a task despite resistance, rather than the prerequisite for knowing you’re focusing on the “right” thing.

This perspective shift uproots scarcity thinking because it serves as a natural emotion regulator. When you act without waiting for a feeling, you become the generator, rather than the passive receiver, of gratification.

This expands your competence because it urges you to stop looking at emotions as signals of what you can and can’t pursue. Then you’re free from the cultural engineers who want you to be limited by what you love.

“Do I live according to my deepest truths or to fulfill someone’s expectations? One cannot be autonomous as long as one is driven by relationship dynamics, by guilt or attachment needs, by hunger for success, by fear of the boss or fear or boredom. The reason is simple: autonomy is impossible as long as one is driven by anything.” — Gabor Mate

The slogans above are corrosive because they encourage us to fixate on thinking habits that restrict our ability to act spontaneously.

Re-programming our patterns boils down to the pursuit of autonomy, or the ability to act on fresh, self-generated perceptions, rather than compulsive patterns driven by self-denial and scarcity-based belief systems.

For more tools to help you replace & upgrade culturally engineered lifestyle and thought habits: