The Economy Needs You To Feel Like A Failure

TITLE: The Economy Needs You To Feel Like A Failure- Barry’s Economics CHANNEL: Barry’s Economics DATE: 2026-04-05 ---TRANSCRIPT--- You are statistically speaking one of the richest human beings that has ever lived. You and I live in the wealthiest most technologically advanced civilization in the history of human existence. You have more access to food, more medicine, more entertainment, more connection, more comfort, and yet somehow the dominant emotional state of modern life is something’s off. I I should probably check my email again, right? Yeah, let’s just Yeah. Okay. If you’re anything like me or most people, something still feels like it’s not quite enough, right? That you’re slightly behind that the next thing maybe that will sort it. The raise or the car or the purchase or, you know, just the final thing that will just make everything click and then ah great, good. And that feeling isn’t an accident and it actually isn’t a character flaw either, despite what some self-help gurus or podcasts would have you believe. Although you can get over that flaw with

I genuinely believe it tastes delicious. It’s maybe my favorite Hu product ever. Your dissatisfaction and unhappiness with where you are right now is connected directly to the growth agenda. Because the whole story of the last 200 years or more is 100% the story of what growth made possible. And it’s an extraordinary story. Growth was entirely the right answer. It was a necessary answer not just to thriving but survival. But what happens when the tool that built the modern world starts to show not just diminishing returns but when it starts giving you actively the wrong returns and the science not the politics the science neuroscience and psychology actually tells us clearly and unambiguously what we need to do next. So, I’m going to start about two or 30 hund years ago because before we can understand what’s broken, we need to understand what was built and why it was extraordinary. Because for most of human history, all of human history, life was genuinely materially on the edge. Like not just uncomfortable. Most people like lived entirely dayto-day, monthtomonth, certainly not as far as year to year. Famines were regular. Child mortality was catastrophic. The average human life expectancy for most of recorded history hovered somewhere between 30 and 40 years. And then roughly two 300 years ago, something changed. The industrial revolution followed by the explosion of capital, technology, trade, innovation broke what economists call the Malthusian trap, which is a cycle of where any productivity gain got eaten by the population growth. Global life expectancy has more than doubled. Infant mortality fell off a cliff and extreme poverty defined on living less than $2 a day has like dropped from affecting the majority of humanity to under 10%. Literacy, calories, access to clean water, infant survival, every basic metric of human welfare went on a 200year upward curve that is genuinely like one of the most remarkable things that’s ever happened on this planet. And growth did that. Capital did that. Like the restless human drive to build, invest, expand, and improve. That that did that. Why did human beings turn out to be so good at growth? And the answer is in your brain, specifically in a neurotransmitter that you’ve probably heard of called dopamine. Now, dopamine often gets called the pleasure chemical, but that’s not entirely accurate. It would be more accurate to call it the anticipation chemical, the wanting chemical. This monkey has been trained that when the little light comes on, if I press this lever 10 times after a little bit of a delay, I’ll get some food. It understands the task. So, what do we have here? We have first a signal, the light coming on saying it’s one of those sessions. And what everyone initially thought was dopamine would go up after the reward. That’s not when it goes up. It goes up when the signal comes on. What’s this? This is the monkey they’re sitting and saying, “I know this. I know the drill. I know this. I’m on top of this. This is going to be great. I know what I do now. This is completely perfect. 100% I’m going for today.” Dopamine is not about pleasure. It’s about the anticipation of pleasure. It’s about the pursuit of happiness rather than happiness itself. The neurotransmitter fires most powerfully not when a reward is received but in the gap between wanting and getting. Now instead shift to where you get the reward only 50% of the time. You do the work and only about half the time you get the reward. So what happens to dopamine levels there? This is what they do. They go through the roof because what have you just done? You’ve introduced the word maybe into the equation. and maybe is addictive like nothing else out there because the light comes on and you’re doing the I know how this works. This is going to be great, but I screwed up last time because I didn’t get the food, but this time I’m feeling good today, but I’m a total screw-up and I’m inadequate in junior high school and it was terrible and I’m but maybe this time this is my lucky day and just vacasillating all over the place. What we see here is dopamine comes pouring out like mad. It’s the uncertainty of the reward, which is also something that BF Skinner showed, and you can see that in this video here. The brain is wired to find the chase more neurologically stimulating than the catch. Fact, which is why gambling is so addictive, why social media notifications are compulsive, and why the next purchase rarely delivers what the wanting of it promised. Everybody thinks dopamine is about reward. It’s actually about the anticipation of reward. Here’s a demonstration of it. Our willing assistant Sophie with his handwagon will be from the moment I’m coming towards him. He stops as soon as it stopped. Yes. So from a neurological standpoint, the last 200 years of capitalism is an extraordinarily wellineered system for keeping you permanently in that gap, right? There’s always a next thing, a better model, a higher salary, a bigger house, a newer version. The system is in a very literal sense a dopamine delivery mechanism at scale. And it works by making sure that the reward never fully lands. That brain, the restless, wanting, never quite satisfied brain, was not a design flaw in the context of genuine scarcity. It was entirely the right tool for that world where scarcity was everywhere. The people that were never quite satisfied with enough, who always wanted more, who always took risks, who pushed forward. Those are the people that survived hard winters, found new territory, built new things. Evolution selected hard for that brain. And then that brain built the industrial economy. And the industrial economy learned to feed that brain. And for a long time, those two things together produced miracles. But what nobody is talking about now and it frustrates me to no end is that that dopamine circuit, the one that drove exploration, risk, ambition, investment on and on the dissatisfaction to try and find a way towards stability and survival. It doesn’t know what to do in a world that has enough. It wasn’t built for sufficiency. It has no off switch for abundance. Evolution never needed to program one. The wanting brain placed in a world of plenty just doesn’t relax, doesn’t feel grateful. Because the way that the dopamine cycle works is your brain constantly escalates. It finds new things to chase, status, followers, network, the approval of strangers. It turns luxury into necessity and necessity into entitlement. And then it just keeps looking for the next next horizon. Want I want it. I want it. I want it. Because what’s happening? We’re running scarcity software in a sufficiency world. Sounds like an 80s track, but not a good one. And the growth economy doesn’t just allow want. It requires it. An economy that stops growing because people felt genuinely satisfied. It would collapse, wouldn’t it? Like your contentment is structurally speaking a problem for the system. Stop wanting. No, does not compute. Keep wanting. Want. You need to want more. Want harder. athletic greens. That’s why I use Alpha Brain with one scoop every morning. A very, very delicious scoop. So, let’s look at the data. There’s a remarkable body of evidence that maps precisely where growth stops converting into well-being. And it tells us why. So, in the 1970s, economist Richard Eastland discovered something that has become known as the Eastern paradox. He found that beyond certain income thresholds, additional wealth stops converting into additional life satisfaction. The solid line represents the actual course of income and of happiness over time. And as you can see uh the peaks indicated by little p and the troughs indicated by little t are synchronous in the short run. However, if we fit a trend line to income on the one hand and happiness on the other, you will see the trend in happiness does not concur with the trend in income. Not only that, but recent research by Angus Eaton found that the happiness income curve, it actually plateaus specifically around $75 to $100,000 in household income. And that’s the point at which your basic needs and then some a bit more are reliably met. But after that you can keep doubling the number and doubling number and actually the needle on life satisfaction barely twitches. Not only that, but a famous study by Daniel Carnean and Angus Deon in 2010 found that the happiness to income curve actually plateaus once people started earning over £75 to £100,000 a year. Now, in the interest of scientific accuracy, I do have to say that that study was contradicted 11 years later by the scientist Matthew Kingsworth. And this is why I love science because Daniel Carnean then got together with Matthew Kingsworth and together they reviewed their methodologies which then resulted in them authoring a joint paper in 2023 which concluded that there was way less correlation between happiness and incomes than you’d expect. So yeah, I love science which ties into something else you might have heard of which is Abraham Maslau’s hierarchy of needs which gives us a useful if I don’t know imperfect framework for understanding why Maslau mapped human requirements in layers. He kind of said there are basic needs. Those are first food, water, shelter, warmth and then safety, then belonging and then connection and then esteem. And then only then at the top he added something called selfactualization which is a fuller expression of human potential. And the growth economy has been extraordinary at delivering the lower rungs of that hierarchy. The problem is that it never updated its goal. It is kept optimizing for the bottom of the pyramid long after most people, especially in wealthy societies, had climbed it because the profit motive requires you to keep wanting, not to feel that you’ve got enough. And that effect has been studied again and again and again. For example, uh psychologist Tim Casser has spent his entire career studying what he calls materialist values like the prioritization of wealth, status, and acquisition. Very early on in 1995 or six, we made a distinction between what we called intrinsic values and exttrinsic values. So intrinsic values are values like your own personal growth or having good relationships with family and friends or contributing to the community. And we call those intrinsic values because from our theoretical perspective, they are intrinsically satisfying to pursue. You’re doing them because they matter in and of themselves and because they meet intrinsic psychological needs that all people have from our theoretical perspective. So just like a plant needs a certain amount of water and sunlight, people have psychological needs too that have to be fulfilled for people to thrive. Exttrinsic goals and values on the other hand are values which are focused on rewards and praise. And the three main exttrinsic goals we’ve studied have been for money, for image, and for status. And those are all exttrinsic in the sense, as you can see, they involve getting some external reward or praise. But they’re also pursued as a means to some other end. So why do people want money? Well, the money in of itself isn’t doesn’t do anything. It’s it’s good for some other reason, right? So um after establishing this distinction between intrinsic and exttrinsic goals, what we found in our research and what has been replicated dozens of times in lots and lots of different nations since then is that the more that people prioritize intrinsic goals relative to exttrinsic goals, the higher their personal well-being, um the higher uh the more they treat other people in ways which will facilitate other people’s well-being and the more they behave in ways ways which facilitate the earth’s well-being. Um on the other hand, when people focus on those exttrinsic goals for money, image, and status, what the research shows is that they have lower personal well-being. They treat other people in more manipulative, less empathic ways, and they behave in ways which are more damaging to the environment. Those findings stand in contrast with a lot of psychological perspectives which would suggest no, you just whatever goal is fine. And clearly they stand in real opposition to the messages that consumer capitalism tells us 3,000 times a day through advertisements and other means. The very values that the growth economy promotes most aggressively are the ones most negatively correlated with actual feeling good about life. The economy isn’t accidentally making you feel like you never have enough. It requires you to feel that you never have enough. You need to feel dissatisfied for the economy to work. So that incredible growth economy worked for years and then technology and social media arrived because if the growth economy was running a quiet background program that just kept you slightly unsatisfied, social media turned that program into a full screen 3D experience running at volume 24 hours a day. I I I call it the race to the bottom of the brain stem to you know get people’s attention at all costs. I noticed when I was at Stanford uh there was a there was a class called the persuasive uh technology design class and there’s a whole lab at Stanford that teaches students how to apply uh persuasive psychology principles into technology to persuade people to use products in a certain way. So it’s not about giving you all this freedom. It’s about sucking you in to take your time. So the goal is to keep us on our devices longer. Why? For any company whose business model is advertising or engagement based advertising, meaning they care about the amount of time someone spends on the product. Uh you know, they make more money the more time people spend. So the game becomes how can I throw different persuasive techniques to get people to stay to spend as long as possible and to come back tomorrow. And the most effective way to capture attention turns out to be the same mechanism that the growth economy runs on, triggering the wanting circuit, the comparison circuit, the never quite enough circuit. Every scroll is an unpredictable reward. Every scroll is basically a slot machine. But instead of losing coins into a machine, you’re losing your self-esteem into a CPU. Social media is basically a slot machine that occasionally gives you a compliment. Every single metric, likes, followers, views, is a status signal that can always be higher. Every feed is algorithmically optimized to show you people who have more, do more, look better, live bigger. We’re turning to it more and more often. We check our phones about 150 times a day. You know, each of us have to tune in for our own experience. I mean, what what does it feel like when we check our phones 150 times a day? Or what does it feel like if we’ve been scrolling and and had our our face down and not breathing very much when we’re scrolling for say 20 minutes? I mean, how how do we feel on the inside? How do you feel on the inside? I feel like I uh don’t feel very good after that. And that’s not because the algorithm is evil or malicious. Well, that does feel like that sometimes or certainly the people that make it are, but it’s because it’s what keeps you scrolling. It’s their business model. The growth economy and the attention economy are running the same program that exploits that neurological bug, the dopamine anticipation system. The one that evolution built for scarcity and that two industries have leared to farm. We used to hunt animals for food. Now we hunt brains for dopamine loops. Right now the global economy is acting way more like a parasitic bug on that dopamine system than a feature than a useful feature. Now you might say, “Hang on, there’s still poverty and there’s still scarcity in the world, right? So surely we need to keep growing.” Yeah, there is. But what’s historically new is the world now has the technological capacity to meet the needs for everyone on the planet. And that’s not a utopian claim. It’s a logistical one. On food, for example, the world presently produces roughly like one and a half times the calorific needs needed to feed every single person on the planet. Hunger today is a distribution problem, not a production problem. Whereas for most of human history, it was absolutely a production problem. And that’s changed. On energy, the cost of solar has fallen 90% in a single decade. The International Energy Agency has confirmed that global renewable resources could power human civilizations many times over. The constraint is no longer physical possibility. It’s political will and financing. On education, a child with a smartphone and an internet connection has access to more knowledge than a student at Oxford University had in

High quality education is for the first time in history not fundamentally scarce. The gap is connectivity not the existence or distribution possibility for the tools themselves. Because in the last 20 years we’ve crossed a threshold. For the first time in human history the elimination of genuine scarcity is not a fantasy. And that is an extraordinary but absolutely unappreciated fact. Which means that growth, growth, growth, growth, growth at all costs is running on a broken promise. We are using a scarcity brain in a world that has for the first time the genuine capacity for sufficiency. And here’s the other objection that I hear. Maybe the growth system has some downsides, but it works because it motivates people, right? If you take away the carrot of financial reward and endless advancement, like why is anyone going to get out of bed? What’s going to drive innovation then? What’s going to stop everything just grinding to a halt? And it’s a fair question and it deserves a direct answer. And the answer is this. The growth system did not create human motivation. It borrowed it. Curiosity, the drive to master difficult things, the satisfy, the satisfaction of solving a hard problem, the desire to build something lasting, none of those were invented by capitalism. They predate it by hundreds of thousands of years. You know, cave painters were not chasing bonuses. Well, I just think if I uh do the onyx in a particular way, I’ll be able to get slightly more yearend love. Am I a caveman in this? Yes, I am. I am a posh caveman. I don’t know. The scientists of the Enlightenment were frequently they weren’t wealthy men. Michelangelo did not paint the cysteine chapel because he was chasing a quarterly bonus. Right? Linux, the software running most of the internet, how you’re watching this right now, was built largely for free by people who apparently just really really wanted to fix each other’s code at 2 a.m. Capitalism did not invent that impulse. It just stole the credit. The growth economy didn’t create that drive. It harnessed it. And here’s what the research shows about what happened next. Desessie and Ryan’s self-determination theory is one of the most replicated findings in motivational psychology. In one classic study, participants were given an interesting puzzle to solve. Like one group was paid for solving that puzzle and the other wasn’t. When left alone during a free choice period though, the paid group spent less time playing with the puzzle than the unpaid group. And he replicated this across multiple conditions and found that verbal praise actually increased the intrinsic motivation whereas tangible rewards decreased it.

When we’re talking about motivation, what do we mean by motivation? When I started the field way way back in the 1970s, the dominant theory of motivation was uh is what is depicted on this slide. The idea was you could motivate people if you had the right rewards. Uh you could get them to do what you want or if you had the right sanctions, you could get them to do what you want. Uh this is the classic uh theories of operant behavior. Um and it’s not a wrong theory. It’s a theory that uh can be very powerful in its own circumstance. If you’ve got an organism and you’ve got it trapped in a cage and you’ve got all the rewards and punishments, you can manipulate it in many directions. In a workplace, if people don’t have choice to uh leave their job, if you’ve got a big enough stick or a strong enough carrot, you might be able to motivate people. But the problem with this model is that people aren’t in a cage. If you have really terrible social conditions and they have any choice at all, they either leave the cage or they show their disappointment by slowdowns uh poor quality work disengagement and many other means. Their research demonstrated clearly that exttrinsic rewards, money, status, performance targets reliably undermine intrinsic motivation over time. This is known as the crowding out effect. Like which is when you begin paying people to do something that they already find meaningful, they find it less meaningful. The external reward essentially replaces the internal one. And when the reward is removed or simply feels insufficient, the motivation disappears. And Daniel Pink’s synthesis for this research found that complex creative cognitive work, the kind that actually drives innovation and progress that the three of the most powerful motivators for that are autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Financial reward functions well as a motivator only for simple mechanical tasks. But for the work that moves civilizations forward, it’s a surprisingly weak driver. And when applied clumsily, it actively crowds out the deeper motivation that would have done the job better. So the answer to well, what motivates people if there’s not this endless growth cycle? Well, it’s not nothing. It’s the same things that motivated the best human work before the growth system got hold of the economy. The desire to get better at something. the satisfaction of contributing to something larger than yourself. The pleasure of a problem solved, a thing made, a person helped. The growth model didn’t unlock human potential. In fact, in many cases, the evidence above suggests that it’s been quietly suppressing human potential. has been replacing deep intrinsic self- sustaining motivation with an exttrinsic reward structure that is actually more fragile, more anxious and less generative than what it replaced. We don’t need to manufacture motivation for a postgrowth world. We need to stop drowning it out because the constant need to be anxious to grow stops us accessing those real drivers to purpose and meaning. Growth, growth, and growth. And this is quite a good time for me to say uh I do love making this channel. I really enjoy it, but it does cost money to make happen. And while I’m not all about the growth agenda, I would be pretty hypocritical if I was given what I’ve just been saying. But if you’re finding meaning in this video, please do consider supporting it in some way. I’m going to expand to as much as selfsufficiency or a nonloss model. So if you like this video and if you’d like it to continue, consider helping me on Patreon or Kofi or buy me a coffee. Or if you don’t have any money, don’t worry about it. Just maybe click subscribe or whatever hype points are. I don’t know what they are, but hype. So, so this argument is not about stopping. It’s not about shrinking. It’s not about guilt or austerity or going backwards. It’s not about, I don’t know, being a hippie. It’s about an upgrade. We understand upgrades, right? Because the deeper human reward system, the one that produces durable well-being rather than a spike and a crash, runs on entirely different circuitry. And the science here is as compelling as anything that we’ve discussed so far. Now, there’s a scientist that studied this that I’m not going to try and insult by saying their name incorrectly, but it is this. I can only apologize. And they spent decades studying what they call flow, which is a state of deep, effortless absorption in a meaningful and appropriately challenging task. Athletes, musicians, surgeons, programmers, artists all describe the same experience. time disappears. Self-consciousness drops away and actively becomes its own reward. There are these seven conditions that seem to be there when a person is in flow. There’s this focus that once it becomes intense leads a sense of ecstasy, a sense of clarity. You know exactly what you want to do from one moment to the other. You get immediate feedback. You know that what you need to do is possible to do even though difficult and sense of time disappears. You forget yourself. You feel part of something larger. And once those conditions are present, what you’re doing becomes worth doing for its own sake. And we can measure this very precisely. two things that we measure is the amount of challenge people experience at that moment and the amount of skills that they feel they have at that moment. So for each person we can establish a average which is the center of the diagram that would be your mean level of challenge and skill which will be different from that of anybody else but you have a kind of a set point there which would be in the middle. If we know what that set point is, we can predict fairly accurately when you will be in flow and it will be when your challenges are higher than average and skills are higher than average. For everyone that flow channel, that area there will be when you’re doing what you really like to do. Flow is not triggered by acquisition or reward. It’s triggered by mastery by the experience of growing into a difficult problem. The neurological profile of flow is distinct and totally different from the dopamine seeking of acquisition. It actually involves the quieting of the default mode network and the full system engagement that people consistently rate as there among the most meaningful and satisfying experiences. Mastery, contribution, and challenge are the real drivers of human flourishing and practically useful and efficient growth, not accumulation. And there is a huge amount of peer-reviewed and detailed research on this including Martin Seligman’s incredible positive psychology and the perma model which I might feature in future videos. The opportunity in front of us is not to switch off ambition. It is to direct it properly. The same drive that built the industrial world, curiosity, the desire to solve hard problems, the willingness to invest in a better future can be pointed at the genuinely hard problems that we now face. Distribution, ecological restoration, mental health, community, meaning. These are harder problems than make more stuff. Humans are profoundly manipulable in this realm. And it turns out so are other species, the exact same neurochemistry. So what winds up being unique about us. And what you see is with humans, it’s the time dimension. You get the signal, you do the work, you get the reward. And the question becomes how much time lag time can there be between the work and the reward to still elicit the behavior to still get the work coming out. And we have just entered uniquely human terrain there for the very simple reason that probably most of us recognize which is somewhere along the way almost all of us worked very hard in school to get good SAT scores to get into a good college to get GREs to get into a good grad school to get a good job to get in the nursing home of our choice there sort of thing. And what we see is this astonishing ability of humans to keep those dopamine levels up for decades and decades waiting for the reward. And in the most bizarre unique realm of this in humans, sometimes we could maintain it with a belief system where the reward doesn’t come in our lifetime. The reward comes after our death. The reward comes in our afterlife. The reward comes unto the next generations. And there’s no monkey out there who’s willing to lever press all the time because of what St. Peter’s going to think somewhere down the line. So that is unique about us.