When Scarcity Outlasts Our Success: How We Were Never Allowed to Want

A friend asked me a simple question recently: What color backpack did you want when you were a kid?

My answer surprised even me. I don't have the luxury of wanting things. That's what came out, before I'd even thought about it. Because growing up, I was keenly aware of my family's financial situation.

He asked if that had changed.

Slowly, I said. But there's still some residual discomfort around allowing myself to want.

I sat with that exchange for days afterward. Because here's the thing nobody tells you about scarcity: it doesn't dissolve the moment your bank account changes. It doesn't expire when you hit the income goal, or buy the house, or finally stop checking your account balance before you check the weather. Scarcity isn't really about money. It's about what money taught you to believe was possible for you to want.

I think about fifth grade a lot, actually. School Daze had just come out, and everybody at school was getting biker shorts for field day. I wanted them desperately — we're probably talking five, eight dollars — but I didn't ask my parents. I didn't want to stretch an already tight situation over something that felt, even to my ten-year-old self, indulgent. So I just carried the quiet sadness of knowing I wouldn't get to participate the way everyone else would.

My dad noticed I was down on a walk we took together. When I told him why, he surprised me with a pair of shorts — black, not biker shorts, because I'd never let myself be specific. I hadn't asked outright. I'd barely let myself want out loud, let alone name what I wanted clearly enough for someone to give it to me.

That's the part I keep coming back to. Not that I didn't get the biker shorts. That I never let the want take its full shape. I learned, somewhere very young, that wanting itself was the risky part — not the having, the wanting. And once you learn that lesson early enough, it doesn't matter how much your circumstances change later. The lesson doesn't update automatically just because the evidence does.

This is, I think, why so many successful people still feel like they're white-knuckling their way through abundance. You can build the career, hit the number, buy the house — and still flinch internally at the idea of wanting something for no reason other than you want it. Because the achievement updates your bank account. It doesn't automatically update the belief, formed years before any of it, that wanting is dangerous, irresponsible, or for other people.

I see this constantly in the women I work with. They are, by any external measure, doing extraordinarily well. And they will spend an hour with me talking fluently about quarterly goals, five-year plans, legacy, the next promotion — and go completely silent when I ask what they actually want for themselves. Not what they're building. Not what they're achieving. What they want. The silence isn't because they don't have an answer. It's because some part of them never got permission to look for one.

This is also, I suspect, part of why so many of us reach for a career coach before we'd ever consider a life coach. A career coach maps onto everything we already know how to value — productivity, achievement, the next milestone. Hiring one feels responsible, even smart. A life coach implies something else: that the actual object of investment is you, not your output. And if you've spent your whole life being taught that wanting things for yourself is a luxury you haven't earned, that kind of investment can feel almost transgressive.

I don't think this gets fixed by simply deciding to want more, the way you might decide to eat more vegetables. The messages are too old and too well-rehearsed for that. Wanting things is irresponsible. Wanting things is a luxury. Wanting things will create discomfort. Wanting things will put what you love at risk. Wanting things is for people who have overflow — for other people, not you. Those sentences don't disappear because you've achieved enough to disprove them on paper. They live somewhere underneath the achievements, mostly undisturbed, quietly running the show.

What I've found instead is that it takes a kind of deliberate practice — not unlike learning a language late in life. You have to consciously ask the question your instincts were trained to skip. If it didn't make me greedy. If it didn't cost me anything I love. If it didn't put anyone at risk — what would I let myself want? And then, the harder part: saying it out loud. Not because saying it makes it happen, but because saying it is the first proof you have that you're allowed to.

I said out loud, once, that I wanted to move abroad. I had no plan for how. I just let myself say the want before I'd earned the right to have it figured out. And once I'd said it, I started telling people — not because I had a strategy, but because saying it out loud made it real enough to act on. One of those conversations led to work in London. That work led to a three-year project that ended up financially carrying the very move I'd almost talked myself out of wanting.

I don't think that's magic. I think it's closer to this: the desires you actually have are your roadmap. Not your five-year plan. Not the goals you set because they sounded responsible. The things you want and have talked yourself out of — those are pointing somewhere. Squashing them, watering them down, refusing to be specific about them doesn't make you more responsible. It just means you stop checking the map you already have.

So I'll ask you what I keep asking myself: what do you want? Not what you're supposed to want. Not what would look reasonable if you said it out loud at dinner. The actual thing — the one that still feels a little dangerous to name.

Scarcity taught us that wanting itself was the risk. Success doesn't automatically unteach that. Only we can.