The Return of Scarcity: Doomer Psychology, Peak Oil Blues, and Why Modern Souls Are Suddenly Afraid of Running Out.

Tuesday, June 23, 2026. Another response to Afarin Rajaei's reflections on grief, uncertainty, and the emotional atmosphere of modern life.

Perhaps we are not merely anxious about the future. Perhaps we are grieving the future we thought we were going to have.

The first sign was not inflation.

The first sign was that people started talking about eggs the way previous generations talked about comets.

Not practically.

Symbolically.

A carton of eggs became a forecast about civilization.

A referendum on competence.

A mood.

Folks stood in grocery store aisles staring at price tags as if they contained encrypted messages about the future.

Nobody was really looking at the eggs.

They were looking through the eggs. Beyond the eggs.

Into a future that suddenly seemed less cooperative than it once had.

The eggs were innocent. The future was on trial.

That distinction matters because the emotional atmosphere of 2026 is not really about groceries.

Or housing.

Or artificial intelligence.

Or war.

Or climate change.

Or even famine.

Those are the actors.

The story underneath them is scarcity.

Not necessarily scarcity itself.

Because the fear of scarcity suffices.

The suspicion that something once assumed to be abundant may not remain so.

My colleague and former classmate Afarin Rajaei recently suggested that many folks who describe themselves as anxious may actually be grieving.

I think she is right.

But grief requires an object.

Something must be disappearing.

Something must be leaving.

Something must be dying.

The question, then, is obvious.

What exactly are we mourning?

I suspect we are mourning abundance.

Not abundance as luxury.

Abundance as expectation.

The expectation that tomorrow would broadly cooperate.

The expectation that the systems beneath ordinary life would continue functioning.

The expectation that history itself had become manageable.

The expectation that there would always be enough.

Enough food.

Enough money.

Enough opportunity.

Enough stability.

Enough future.

That expectation is beginning to wobble.

And modern souls can feel it.

The End of the Endless Summer

For much of the last thirty years, a remarkable assumption quietly governed life in the developed world.

The assumption was not that problems would disappear.

Problems remained as committed to their profession as ever.

Wars happened.

Recessions happened.

Political scandals happened.

Relatives still arrived at Thanksgiving with opinions nobody requested.

But beneath these annoyances lived a deeper confidence.

The machinery of civilization appeared stable.

Food would arrive.

The lights would come on.

The mortgage would somehow get paid.

The children would probably do better than their parents.

Technology would continue improving life in vaguely magical ways.

History itself seemed domesticated.

Not solved.

Domesticated.

Like a large dog sleeping by the fireplace.

Potentially dangerous.

Mostly asleep.

Then history woke up.

The pandemic reminded us that supply chains are not laws of nature.

Wars reminded us that food has borders.

Inflation reminded us that money is partly emotional.

Housing costs reminded us that shelter can become speculative.

Artificial intelligence reminded us that entire professions may be less permanent than they imagined.

Climate instability reminded us that nature never signed the contract.

None of these developments created the current mood by themselves.

Together, however, they created something powerful.

Doubt.

And doubt spreads through cultures the way moisture spreads through drywall.

Quietly.

Then suddenly.

Peak Oil Blues

I sometimes think the emotional template for our current moment arrived about 20 years ago.

Not through politics.

Not through economics.

Through peak oil.

The predictions themselves proved more complicated than many expected. New technologies emerged. Markets adapted. Civilization did not grind to a halt.

But peak oil left behind something important.

A feeling.

A sadness.

A suspicion.

What if the future is smaller than we expected?

Not catastrophic.

Smaller.

Less expansive.

Less confident.

Less prosperous.

Less certain.

Peak oil was never really about petroleum.

It was about limits.

And limits make modern societies deeply uncomfortable.

Growth has become our civic religion.

We expect economies to grow.

Technology to grow.

Options to grow.

Opportunities to grow.

We are panglossian.

Even our storage units now require storage units.

The possibility that something might reach a limit feels almost offensive.

Yet limits have a habit of returning.

Like relatives nobody invited but who somehow know where the casserole is.

The emotional residue of peak oil never disappeared.

It simply migrated.

Today the question is no longer:

"What if we run out of oil?"

The question now is:

"What if we run out of future?"

The Rise of Doomer Psychology

Every generation develops a characteristic emotional pathology.

The Victorians had melancholy.

The postwar generation had existential dread.

The late twentieth century specialized in irony.

The early twenty-first century increasingly appears devoted to doom.

Not actual doom.

Anticipated doom.

The expectation that decline is inevitable.

The expectation that systems are failing.

The expectation that we have already passed some invisible peak.

Peak affordability.

Peak trust.

Peak attention.

Peak democracy.

Peak competence.

Peak optimism.

Doomer psychology fascinates me because it rarely requires evidence of catastrophe.

Possibility is sufficient.

The doomer is not always predicting collapse.

More often, the doomer is predicting disappointment.

Which may be psychologically harder.

Collapse is dramatic.

Decline is tedious.

A meteor gets everyone's attention.

A gradual erosion of confidence is harder to see and harder to fight.

This helps explain why so many folks feel exhausted.

Not because they are living through catastrophe.

Because they are living through uncertainty.

The emotional burden comes from constantly asking the same question.

Will things continue getting worse?

Nobody knows.

The nervous system hates that answer.

The Middle-Class Panic Nobody Wants to Name

The poor have always understood scarcity.

The wealthy possess enough insulation to negotiate with it.

The modern emotional crisis belongs largely to the professional middle class.

The attorney.

The therapist.

The physician.

The engineer.

The professor.

The manager.

The accountant.

Folks who followed the instructions.

Get educated.

Work hard.

Delay gratification.

Save money.

Be responsible.

Many achieved precisely what they were told to achieve.

Yet astonishing numbers feel less secure than expected.

Not poor.

Uncertain.

The modern middle class spends an extraordinary amount of time wondering whether it is secretly poor.

Not actually poor.

Future poor.

Potentially poor.

One economic downturn away from discovering that success was thinner than it appeared.

A lawyer earning two hundred thousand dollars worries about retirement.

A physician worries about student loans.

A therapist worries about insurance reimbursement.

A professor worries about relevance.

Everyone appears to be calculating.

Everyone appears to be scanning.

Everyone appears to be wondering whether the floor beneath them is as solid as advertised.

The fear is rarely starvation.

The fear is falling.

That distinction matters.

A young couple is not afraid of homelessness.

They are afraid of discovering that home ownership belongs to someone else's generation.

A professional is not afraid of famine.

He is afraid of losing altitude.

The fear is not extinction.

The fear is downward mobility.

Every Marriage Contains Two Economists

Every marriage contains two economists.

One studies money.

The other studies danger.

They are almost never the same person.

One partner notices numbers.

The other notices atmosphere.

One believes planning creates safety.

The other believes optimism creates safety.

Both are trying to protect the household.

Both feel misunderstood.

Under abundance, these differences can be complementary.

Under uncertainty, they become combustible.

One partner starts preparing.

The other starts reassuring.

One says:

"We should be careful."

The other hears:

"We are in trouble."

One says:

"I'm worried."

The other hears:

"You've failed."

Soon both become lonely.

The planner feels abandoned.

The optimist feels accused.

The argument appears financial.

It rarely is.

The argument concerns trust.

Specifically, whether tomorrow remains trustworthy.

Many couples believe they are fighting about spending.

Often they are fighting about the future.

The Children Know

Children understand almost nothing.

Children understand everything.

Both statements are true.

Children do not understand inflation.

They do not understand housing markets.

They do not understand geopolitical instability.

Yet children possess astonishing sensitivity to atmosphere.

Every generation inherits emotional weather before it inherits ideas.

That may be one of the most important facts about family life.

The children of the Depression inherited scarcity.

The children of the postwar boom inherited optimism.

The children of the Cold War inherited existential tension.

The children growing up today are inheriting uncertainty.

Not because their lives are necessarily worse.

Because uncertainty saturates the environment.

Housing.

Climate.

Artificial intelligence.

War.

Politics.

Debt.

The future.

Always the future.

Children absorb these conversations the way old houses absorb smoke.

Slowly.

Completely.

Permanently.

The nervous system is often the first historian.

Long before a child develops a political philosophy, the body has already formed an opinion about whether the world feels safe.

The Scarcity Nobody Expected

Yet the deepest scarcity of our moment may not be economic.

It may be attention.

The wealthiest civilization in history appears increasingly unable to provide one of the most basic human experiences.

Feeling seen.

Not visible.

Seen.

Those are entirely different things.

Visibility is public.

Being seen is intimate.

Visibility says:

"I know you exist."

Attention says:

"I know who you are."

Modern culture produces visibility at industrial scale.

Attention remains stubbornly artisanal.

And increasingly scarce.

Spouses feel unseen.

Children feel unseen.

Employees feel unseen.

Elderly folks feel unseen.

Entire communities feel unseen.

The irony is astonishing.

We built machines capable of delivering nearly infinite information.

We simultaneously created an economy that consumes human attention faster than it can be replenished.

The result is a civilization experiencing abundance and deprivation at the same time.

An abundance of everything except what matters most.

Many relationships are not starving for money.

They are starving for attention.

Many souls are not starving for opportunity.

They are starving for recognition.

The hunger is different.

The nervous system often cannot tell.

AI and the End of Professional Immunity

For decades, automation threatened other people.

Factory workers.

Travel agents.

Cashiers.

Then artificial intelligence arrived and began knocking on different doors.

Attorneys.

Engineers.

Programmers.

Consultants.

Writers.

Therapists.

The panic was not merely economic.

It was existential.

Highly educated professionals suddenly found themselves standing in the same line as everyone else, staring into the future and squinting.

Nobody knew exactly what would happen.

That was the problem.

The uncertainty itself became destabilizing.

A civilization that spent decades worshipping expertise suddenly discovered that expertise no longer guaranteed immunity.

This realization landed with particular force among those who had built identities around competence.

The question lurking beneath many AI discussions is surprisingly ancient.

Will there still be a place for me?

Every era asks this question differently.

The emotion remains remarkably consistent.

Famine and the Failure of Relationships

The return of famine to public consciousness has intensified these anxieties.

Not because most Westerners fear famine personally.

They do not.

What famine reveals, however, is deeply unsettling.

The fragility of systems.

Most folks imagine famine as a shortage of food.

Increasingly, famine tells a different story.

The food exists.

The roads exist.

The warehouses exist.

The knowledge exists.

Yet people starve anyway.

The problem lies between resources and relationships.

Between capacity and cooperation.

Between production and trust.

Modern famine often emerges not because civilization lacks resources but because civilization loses the ability to move resources where they are needed.

That should concern all of us.

Because it reveals a larger truth.

Scarcity is often relational.

Not merely material.

Food exists.

Trust fails.

Resources exist.

Relationships collapse.

The same principle applies to families.

The same principle applies to marriages.

The same principle applies to societies.

What We Are Actually Grieving

This brings me back to Afarin.

I think she is right.

Many folks are grieving.

But perhaps the object of grief is larger than any individual loss.

Perhaps we are grieving certainty itself.

The certainty that tomorrow would resemble today.

The certainty that progress was inevitable.

The certainty that institutions broadly knew what they were doing.

The certainty that effort guaranteed stability.

The certainty that abundance was permanent.

History, unfortunately, has never shared these assumptions.

History remains stubbornly committed to surprise.

Perhaps that is what modern souls are struggling to accept.

Not that abundance has vanished.

It hasn't.

Not that civilization is collapsing.

It isn't.

But that certainty was always an illusion.

A useful illusion.

A comforting illusion.

An expensive illusion.

And now it is dissolving.

A Couple in the Grocery Store

A few weeks ago I watched an older couple standing quietly in front of a grocery shelf.

They weren't arguing.

They weren't speaking.

One picked up an item.

Looked at the price.

Put it back.

The other nodded.

Then they stood there together for a moment.

Looking at the shelf.

Looking at each other.

Looking back at the shelf.

The shelves were full.

The lights were bright.

The carts were moving.

Nothing appeared wrong.

Yet standing there, watching that couple calculate, I found myself thinking that scarcity had already arrived.

Not in the grocery store.

The grocery store was full.

In the story.

The story we have been telling ourselves about tomorrow.

The age of abundance promised us more.

More growth.

More prosperity.

More options.

More convenience.

More everything.

The age now emerging appears to be asking a different question.

Not how much more.

How much is enough?

Perhaps that is the grief Afarin identified.

Not fear that civilization is ending.

Not fear that abundance is disappearing.

But grief over discovering that abundance was never the point.

The point was trust.

The point was human meaning.

The point was believing that when uncertainty arrived—as it always does—we would not face it alone.

And when a civilization begins to doubt that story, everything suddenly feels more profoundly tentative.

Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.