How to Not be Needy: Small Scarcity & Big Scarcity

The other day, one of the advanced members of our Girls Chase forums asked me about how you root out scarcity in all its forms, and how to resist the sometimes overpowering urge to give into it.

Scarcity can spring naturally from the situations you find yourself in, but it may also be engineered: individuals (and organizations) who understand the value of scarcity can also use it to make themselves more in-demand and attract higher value friends, mates, and associates. It’s all around us, pervades what we do, and we use it on each other, intentionally or inadvertently, non-stop. As you become an increasingly valuable individual socially, there will be more and more people who feel scarcity interacting with you (or trying to), and usually there will still always be someone or something you yourself continue to feel it with or for.

Scarcity takes many forms:

• You meet a girl who’s super hot and perfect for you and you can’t help feeling nervous around her and acting different around her

• You reach a point in a relationship where you find yourself going back and forth over whether staying with this girl is what you really want, but feeling unsure whether you’re ready to give her up
  

• You reach a point in a relationship where your girlfriend is clearly going back and forth over whether staying with you is clearly what she really wants, and it makes you feel helpless
  

• You find yourself working a job that’s pretty good, but not perfect, and while some part of you wants to leave, another part isn’t sure if other jobs are necessarily better... and you may be safer just staying right where you are

• You find yourself talking with a salesman who seems to be offering something you might be interested in, but he’s pushing you for a decision now and you’re not sure whether to take the plunge or beg off
  

In any of these scenarios and a whole lot more, scarcity, in one of its many forms, snakes its way into your heart and tightens its grip around your psyche.

Possibly on its own; possibly due to the machinations of those around you.

Sometimes you may fight free from scarcity, yet some of the time it gets you. And sometimes the end result is okay and you get the thing you felt needy toward and the thing turns out to be worthwhile, while other times you realize sooner or later you settled for something less than what you could’ve had... had you been a little braver. Or you tripped over your own two feet in your attempt to secure it, and chucked yourself out of the running in the process.

How do you combat the creeping feeling of neediness you get whenever you wind up in a truly scarce position, and instead remain calm, measured, and effective?

Small Scarcity vs. Big Scarcity

I break scarcity down into two (2) different varieties. See if you can tell the difference:

1. Small Scarcity: this involves any issue where you’re dealing with something new and unfamiliar, like a girl you’ve just met or an opportunity you’ve just happened upon.

2. Big Scarcity: this involves any issue where you’re dealing with something old and familiar, like a girl you’ve been dating or a project you’ve been involved in for some time.
   

Can you tell what the difference is between these two types of scarcity?

• Both involve a fear of loss or missed opportunity

• However, small scarcity is primarily concerned with missing out on the potential of a thing: this thing has so much potential to be great / this girl has so much potential to be amazing... what if I miss it/her and never get another shot at it/her?

• Meanwhile, big scarcity is primarily concerned with losing the investment you have in a thing, or being unable to replace it (or her); the fear here is, I’m already so invested and this thing (or girl) is a known quantity... if I leave now, I’m back out in the wilderness, and who knows what I’ll find out there? It could be better... but I’m afraid it might be worse
  

It’s important to understand that the two kinds of scarcity are driven by the same core fear: what if this is the best I can get... I’d better not blow it or lose it... but with small scarcity, the uncertainty is chained to the potential of the girl or opportunity: you only have the most superficial information on whether she or it is as good as you hope, yet you can’t help feeling that she/it may well be. With big scarcity, your current girl/opportunity is a known quantity, and now you’re faced with deciding whether you want to leave her/it aside to gamble on another, less known one.

Because the two different kinds of scarcity are different, the feeling of need they inspire is different (small scarcity: “I want to have her... Ohhhh... can I get her? I don’t want to miss having her!”; big scarcity: “I’ve put so much work into this... our connection is so special... I don’t want to have to start from scratch all over with someone new”), and thus, the way you handle the scarcity and its attached neediness is different.

How Do You Handle ‘Small Scarcity’?

Examples of ‘small scarcity’:

• You’ve just met a girl, and she seems more perfect than any other girl
• You’re applying to school, and there’s really only one school you want to attend
  
• You’re looking to move laterally at work, but only one position will do it
• You make an important business contact, and you really want to impress him
• You meet a really cool, socially connected guy, and you have to befriend him
  

In all of these examples, the scarcity felt is toward something you do not have. You don’t have it, and you want to get it... acquire it.

According to Timothy Brock of Ohio State University’s Department of Psychology in “Implications of Commodity Theory for Value Change”, scarcity ups the value and desirability of anything that can be attained, used, and transferred.

That means that, really, ‘scarcity’ is just another kind of value. Is it real value? Or ephemeral? That depends, as with all things of value, on whoever is judging its value. Value is subjective; it’s in the eye of the beholder.

You may walk into a strip club and turn your nose up at how fake everything is there: fake women with fake body parts putting on fake displays of attraction toward men who are quite often faking how well-off they really are. Yet, there are plenty of men who go to strip clubs and honestly, genuinely view the women they meet dancing there as some of the choicest, most desirable, highest status women around; to date one of the strippers at their local strip joint would be like dating a celebrity or a debutante to them. It’s their fantasy.

So, in many ways, scarcity is actually a kind of value, albeit value that’s perhaps easier to scoff at than, say, artisanal skill. Yet a woman who is masterful at conveying scarcity will tend to be held in much higher regard by many more of her peers than, say, a woman who is masterful at wood-carving, who may be respected, but not revered.

How then do you handle scarcity?

There are two (2) parts to it:

1. Perspective, and
2. Exposure
   

Perspective keeps you out of the matrix. Perspective is the guy who walks into a strip club aware, both logically and emotionally, that strippers are just women who know how to dance, know how to flirt men’s socks off (not to mention wallets out), and don’t wear a lot of clothing, which triggers certain biological urges in men. There’s nothing special about the women themselves aside from dance skill and flirting skill (which can actually be quite good, particularly with the more dedicated strippers), and the guy doesn’t get sucked into the illusion of thinking this girl wants him just because she’s aimed her attention in his direction.

Exposure allows you to navigate the matrix. Once you’ve been sufficiently exposed to strippers, watched how they run their game, spent time with them outside of work, and slept with / dated a few, you know how to get them, what to say to them, what they’re weak for, what they’re excited about, which buttons to push and which ones not to.

You need both perspective and exposure to truly be free from scarcity. One alone does not cut it:

• Walk into a strip club with perspective but not exposure, and you’ll be aware of how fake the whole environment is, yet you still won’t be able to connect with the girls there or take one home later. So despite your awareness of the ersatz nature of the venue, the act of dating or sleeping with a stripper will continue to be out of your reach, which means strippers will still feel scarce to you

• Walk into a strip club with exposure but not perspective, and you’ll know how to get strippers, yet you’ll still buy into the notion of them being higher value or superior than other women. That limits you to primarily to dating strippers, as the only real ‘high value’ women you know how to get, and since strippers tend to have a lot of quirks, you may feel like finding a sane woman is like looking for a bead in a bag full of sand, thus making you feel much needier around those few strippers you meet who seem to match most of your desired qualifications

• Walk into a strip club with perspective and exposure, and you aren’t sucked in by the environment, yet know how to take girls there. You may or may not sleep with a girl from the strip club; if you do, it’ll be fun; if you don’t, no big deal, since these girls are just girls (albeit nice dancers and flirts), and girls are cute and silly, and you can meet more girls anywhere
  

How do you get perspective and exposure?

1. You get perspective by operating in diverse environments. If you spend most or all of your time in only one (1) environment, it becomes monstrously difficult to not view that environment as the whole world. This is why high school seems so important when you are in it (because it sucks up most of your day and everything you do and everyone you interact with, for the most part, comes from your high school), and so insignificant and unimportant once you’re past it (save, perhaps, when reminiscing on your own experiences). The more you operate in diverse environments, the more perspective you hold on all of them: no one place you spend time in seems like the definitive high value place.

   If you really want freedom of perspective, I challenge you to immerse yourself in radically different environments... different enough that the folks from each likely look down on each other. For instance, maybe you work in an artistic field by day, you get dressed up and mingle with the office crowd for happy hours or Chamber of Commerce meetings, then you hang out with your laid back white party friends at a dive bar Thursday night, roll with your wound-up black party friends at a Hip-Hop club Friday night, and go to a diverse, eclectic house music club Saturday night. Then Sunday you take a stroll around the high end shopping street and meet women there, before going to your martial arts class that evening. Live a life like this and you will be free from the paradigms others you meet are trapped in. You will see what they see, but you will also see beyond this.

2. You get exposure by watching, learning, and doing. I don’t just mean exposure as in “I’ve seen that before”; I mean going and watching a girl in action, observing as she runs run her game, taking mental notes on how she says and does similar things with each man she talks to. That can be difficult to do when you’re new, because people tend to be mindful of who’s watching them run their game, and if you’re that interested they will try to include you, and it’s tough to observe when you are also a participant. But if you befriend people like those you want exposure to, or you spend time around organizations you aspire to be a part of, you get to see how they work.

   And then once you’ve figured out how they work, the next aspect is figuring out how to get what you want with them: how to sleep with the perfect girl, how to get into the great school, how to move into the position you want at work, how to impress that business contact, how to truly befriend that cool guy.
   

Pursuing perspective and exposure naturally sifts you into possessing an abundance mentality. To gain sufficient perspective and exposure, you must cultivate contacts, options, and lessons within the sphere you’re looking to reduce scarcity in, and you must also cultivate these outside that sphere.

They very process of cultivating lots of options, figuring out how things work, observing how women (and others) run their game, deciphering it, and building your own effective process for getting them means you deal with quantity as well as quality, and by the time you have both perspective and exposure established, you’ve also done an excellent job of reaching abundance.

Handling ‘Big Scarcity’

Big scarcity is actually the more straightforward of the two to address, at least in terms of telling someone what to do.

However, that doesn’t make it any less troublesome.

I see men all the time who’ve handled small scarcity but who buckle under the strain of big scarcity. A guy has no problem being cool around high value girls, yet once he’s been dating one for a while, if things start not working out, he’s going to spend a lot of time debating and deliberating, unable to let her go. Or, he has no problem landing the great job or the cool friend, yet when the job stops being great and the friend gradually shifts into being a drag on him, it’s a tormenting mental problem he wrestles with determining whether to walk away.

The other side, of course, is being the party in danger of being ditched in the relationship, in which case the feeling of scarcity is tied to fearing losing the more valuable partner / opportunity, in which case you will tend to experience a great deal more neediness.

Big scarcity is hard to deal with because we get less practice. Quite frankly, you get a lot fewer opportunities to learn how to deal with a situation where you’re highly invested in a thing but now it isn’t quite as dandy for you as it was when you started (or where the thing or the girl is thinking about ditching you).

I’m going to focus on talking about the big scarcity feelings you deal with when you’re the one hemming and hawing about going, rather than when you’re the one on the receiving end of a girl, friend, situation, etc., hemming and hawing about cutting the cord with you, but the end result (and what you must focus on) are the same.

So what’s this look like?

Maybe you start dating a girl who’s really fantastic, maybe even out of your league at the start of things, but you continue to grow as a person and she does not, and after a year it begins to feel like you are in fact dating down.

Maybe you take a job that’s absolutely awesome for you at the time, but after a few years you’ve hardly grown, you’re still doing the same now-boring work you did when you came aboard, and every movement you’ve made to better yourself within the company ends up blocked or flounders.

Yet, when you think about leaving that girl, big scarcity rears its head: “I have such an incredible connection with her. And when we got together – wow! She was the hottest girl I’d ever had by FAR. What if we break up, and I discover I’m not as great as I thought? What if we break up and I can only get girls HALF as hot as she is? And she moves on right away and totally forgets me?”

And when you think about leaving that job, the same thing: “This job has been amazing for me – the pay is great, the lifestyle is good, and I don’t even have to work that hard. What if I’m not able to find another job like this? Or what if I find one, take it, and discover I hate the place and regret ever leaving my old company? Maybe it’s better just to stay put where I am.”

What normally happens at this point is:

• You begin to sell yourself on this person / occupation, typically by listing out features and good things: “Well, we’ve already been together two years, and she’s a really caring person, and so sweet... I’d feel so bad about breaking up with her and breaking her heart... she’s really pretty... and oh man, her breasts are perfect... and she cooks way better than my other girlfriends... plus she’s not a slob like Angelica was... I don’t think I could date another girl who’s apartment’s that messy...”

• You start to waffle on any decisions: “You know what, I don’t need to decide on this now... it’s too much to think about; I’ll worry about it later”

• If the person / occupation is savvy, she tries to fix things a bit: it won’t be enough to totally make you happy, because if you’re really deliberating calling it quits there are deeper cracks than anything that can be superficially addressed, but folks who are attuned are often able to do just enough to make the decision yet more complicated for you... e.g., she starts dressing nicer and acting more womanly around you again like she did when the relationship was new, and you start to tell yourself, “See, it’s not so bad... it’s getting better, right?” Or the job comes along and offers you some little perks, and now you feel a little reciprocity toward it
  

And so, the deliberation drags on, nothing decided. You continue to feel this lingering scarcity toward the person/thing you’re invested in, and continue to put off a break up (if it’s a girlfriend) or fade out (if it’s a friend who’s stopped being a valuable friend) or job hunt (if it’s a job that’s not going anywhere fast).

If you’re on the receiving end of potentially getting the boot, you’re the one scrambling to save things feeling the more acute big scarcity of, “Oh crap, I’m about to lose this girl/job/friend... what do I do? How do I save this?”

An interesting result from “Connectedness and Neediness: Factors of the DEQ and SAS dependency scales”, published in the journal Cognitive Therapy and Research, found that neediness and depression are linked. Which makes sense, given that neediness tends to come from wanting something but feeling helpless to get it, and depression is the result of a kind of learned helplessness.

How do you fix big scarcity though – whether you’re on the deliberating or the scrambling side of the scarcity? Simple: mission clarity and focus.

The clearer your mission is and the more focused on realizing it you are, the less time you have for poorly matched diversions.

For example:

• If you know what you stand for and what you want to accomplish, a woman who’s seeming less and less into you or less and less of a fit isn’t much cause for deliberation. She simply isn’t a fit – let’s cut ties, focus on our mission, and, in time, find someone who’s a better fit (and can better help us realize our mission – at the very least by being less of a distraction)

• If you know what you stand for and what you want to accomplish, a job, project, or friend who’s not helping you get there and is blocking the way either needs to get with the program or be ditched. Pretty straightforward, right?
  

Any time you find yourself experiencing big scarcity, take it as a sign you don’t have a strong enough mission to believe in.

If you did, this wouldn’t be that big of a deal.

So, instead of stressing over whatever you feel scarcity toward, spend a little time to clarify your mission and focus on it. Once you have that, the way forward is made clear.

What if you don’t have a ‘mission’?

Well, everybody’s got a mission.

Even if your mission is more of an emotional gut feeling, like the hedonist who just wants a life of pleasure and contentment, or the nihilist who simply doesn’t want to be burdened with anything that will make his presumably directionless life any more miserable, these things are still enough to drive away scarcity if you’re really serious about them. Scarcity wreaks havoc upon a life of pleasure and contentment – get rid of it. And if you’re just biding your time until death or Armageddon, well, there’s not much reason to bide it in scarcity then, is there?

And if you have a more substantial mission than pleasure and contentment, or waiting around for the lights to go out, then all the better – even easier.

Figure out what you’re about, and operate according to it. A life lived in scarcity is not one lived by any precepts – it is an aimless wandering, adrift in the void, subject to the whims and fancies imposed on one by the people and situations one encounters rather than the ends one aspires to.

Be Aware of Scarcity/Need

It isn’t bad to feel scarcity or neediness, but it does alert you to a value imbalance.

This needn’t be a permanent imbalance. Gain perspective, gain exposure, and/or gain mission clarity and focus, and that value imbalance melts away.

Whenever you catch yourself feeling needy, ask yourself what the case is:

• Do I need perspective? If it feels like this girl, friend, situation, or opportunity is significantly high value, you need more perspective (since value is relative). If you feel like it’s a fact, this person/situation is indubitably high value, you really need more perspective. Value is only valuable in some contexts to some people. Meet people who value things differently than you and the pack(s) you run with presently and you will grow your perspective.

• Do I need exposure? If it feels like you are a complete outsider and you have no idea how to get this person or thing you want, you need exposure. Spend time around her/him/it and get familiar, watch how this person interacts with others if it’s a person, or watch whom this company hires and how if it’s a company, etc. Once you have his/her/its modus operandi down, it’s time to figure out a process that lets you win.

• Do I need mission clarity/focus? If you fear letting go of people or situations you’re invested in, even though they are no longer a fit for you or the direction you’re taking in life, you need mission clarity/focus. If you fear being abandoned by someone or something that is no longer satisfied with you, you need mission clarity/focus. Figure out what you’re really about, nail it down, and make it your focus. And become comfortable letting people and situations go if they really are not helpful to get you there.

In this way, feeling neediness or scarcity simply helps you figure out what areas you need to improve in next. Feel the emotion – then, set your game plan out for how you improve.

Chase