Scarcity? Where is the scarcity?
It is worth asking, because we seem to have developed an extraordinary talent for describing abundance as deprivation. We speak endlessly about what people supposedly lack, while surrounded by things previous generations could barely have imagined.
I grew up in the Seventies. We never went hungry. Our plates were full. Our beds were ready and reasonably comfortable. Our clothes were rarely fashionable, but they were clean, durable, and sufficient for what they were meant to do.
And entertainment? That was largely a matter of using our minds.
There was no permanent stream of content waiting to occupy every empty second. No mobile games. No endless reels watched in the toilet. No algorithm quietly deciding what we should look at next.
We had comic books we had already read a hundred times, their pages dog-eared and dirty from repeated handling. We had a box of Lego for rainy days. And when the weather was anything better than awful, we went outside.
Into the dirt. Into the woods. Into the ponds.
We made our own entertainment because there was nobody standing behind a screen offering us an infinite supply of it.
But I also knew people who had experienced something entirely different.
My parents did.
They belonged to the war generation. They grew up in the ruins left by the Second World War. Hunger was not an abstract concept discussed in a policy paper or measured against some carefully constructed threshold. They were hungry. Often.
Winter was not simply a season. It could mean having no coal and being cold for days or weeks because there was nothing to burn.
Clothing was not a matter of personal expression. It was something to be preserved. A pair of shoes might pass from one child to the next as each outgrew them. They were patched, repaired and mended until there was almost nothing left to repair.
What we would now consider inadequate was, for them, simply life.
That is real scarcity.
And that distinction matters.
Today’s children live in what, by historical standards, is close to paradise. They have food in quantities and varieties that would have astonished their grandparents. They have warm homes, abundant clothing, instant communication, entertainment available around the clock, and access to more information than entire generations could have accumulated in a lifetime.
Yet they are constantly told that they are deprived.
Something is always missing.
Something is always insufficient.
There is never enough attention, enough opportunity, enough recognition, enough convenience, enough choice, enough of whatever the current vocabulary of grievance requires.
Compared with genuine scarcity, much of this is almost obscene.
Not because modern life is perfect. It isn’t. Material abundance does not eliminate loneliness, anxiety, frustration or genuine hardship. But we should be capable of distinguishing those things from deprivation itself.
There is a profound difference between not having enough and believing that having less than everything constitutes not having enough.
Perhaps that is one of the peculiar consequences of abundance. Once necessity disappears, expectations expand to occupy the empty space. What was once a luxury becomes normal. What was once unimaginable becomes an entitlement. And what remains beyond reach is then experienced not as something unavailable, but as something unfairly withheld.
Scarcity has not necessarily returned.
The perception of scarcity has.
And perhaps that tells us rather more about the people experiencing it than about the world they inhabit.