What Happens When We Have a Lack of It
- Christopher Han
- 1 day ago
- 7 min read
A Vitamin M deficiency does not look like the absence of luxury. It looks like the contraction of a life. Five places it shows up, and one Singaporean version we do not advertise.
There is a mental experiment I borrow when people tell me they are not interested in money. I ask them to imagine the worst week of their financial life. Not the dramatic week, the boring one. The week the car needed work and the boiler died and the bill arrived for the parking ticket they had forgotten and the credit card minimum was higher than usual and the freelance invoice they were owed went unpaid. Then I ask them what they thought about that week. What they ate. Whether they slept. How they spoke to their partner. Whether they were generous to a stranger.
What people remember is rarely the figures. What they remember is the texture. The brittleness. The narrowing of focus to the immediate problem at the cost of everything else. The particular sound of their own voice when arguing about something that was not really about that thing. The smallness of the world that week. The way time seemed to thicken and slow.
That is what a Vitamin M deficiency feels like. It is not the absence of luxury. It is the contraction of life.
The Research on Scarcity
The research on this is some of the most underrated in modern psychology. Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir spent years studying what scarcity does to cognition, and the headline finding is uncomfortable. People who are financially squeezed perform worse on tests of fluid intelligence, on impulse control, on planning, on the kind of judgement we use for parenting and driving and the calm management of a household. The deficit is roughly the equivalent of a night without sleep, or, by some measures, the IQ effect of being clinically stoned. It is not that poor people are less intelligent. It is that financially stressed people, of any income level, are running on a degraded operating system, and they cannot tell because they are inside it.
The cruelty of the finding is that the very faculties you would need to climb out of scarcity are the faculties scarcity attacks first. Long-term planning. Patience. The ability to weigh small future rewards against immediate ones. Generosity, which protects relationships, which are themselves a kind of insurance. The cognitive bandwidth to negotiate well, to switch jobs, to learn a new skill in the evening. All of these are taxed first by a low Vitamin M state. The poor are not bad at money. They are running on less of the wetware money buys you.
My Own Version of the Story
I learned this the embarrassing way. There was a year, in my late twenties, when I was running a young business that was not yet earning what it cost to live. I was carrying credit card debt with the casualness of a man carrying an umbrella in light rain, on the unspoken assumption that the next big invoice would clear it. The cognitive effects were not dramatic. I did not feel anxious in any acute way.
What I felt, looking back, was a creeping flatness. I made worse decisions on smaller stakes. I ate badly because the calculation was tiring. I argued with my then-girlfriend about which restaurant we should go to because the difference between the two was thirty dollars and the thirty dollars meant something I could not say out loud. I did not write as much as I had planned to write. I did not exercise. I told myself this was just the season of building a business. It was not. It was a season of being subtly malnourished in a nutrient I had not learned to name.
The Five Places a Vitamin M Deficiency Shows Up
Lack of Vitamin M shows up in five places, and they are worth listing because most of us do not connect them.
The first is sleep. Money worries, even subclinical ones, are some of the most reliable disruptors of REM. The American Psychological Association has tracked this for over a decade. The figure that comes up again and again is that money is the leading cause of stress in adults, ahead of work, relationships, and health.
People do not sleep through it. They wake at three. They check their balance with the lock screen. They go back to sleep at five. Their cortisol does not.
The second is health. Long-term financial stress is associated with hypertension, weight gain, gut disorders, weakened immunity, and a measurable acceleration of biological ageing. Some of this is direct biology. Some of it is the missed dental appointment, the deferred check-up, the skipped medication, the cheaper food. The deficiency compounds.
The third is relationships. The leading cause of divorce in most surveyed countries is not infidelity. It is money. Or, more precisely, it is the failure to align two people's relationships to money inside a single household. Couples in financial stress argue more, listen less, and concede less generously. They do not separate because of money. They separate because money exposed everything else.
The fourth is judgment. People in scarcity make worse choices not because they are foolish but because their bandwidth is already spoken for. The classic example is the payday loan. From the outside, it is irrational, expensive, and self-defeating. From the inside, it is rational under bandwidth constraints. The cost shows up later, after the deeper deficiency has had its way. Most of the financial behaviour that looks dumb from a position of comfort is bandwidth behaviour. It is what you do when you do not have the headroom to do better.
The fifth, and the one we talk about least, is dignity. A sustained Vitamin M deficiency hollows out a person's sense of agency. They begin to view themselves as someone things happen to, rather than someone who shapes things. They stop applying for jobs they would be good at. They stop pursuing relationships they would be nourished by. They stop imagining a different life. The deficiency colonises identity. By the time it has done so, the person is no longer making the kinds of choices that would change their position.
The Singaporean Version We Do Not Advertise
There is a Singaporean version of this that I want to name because it is invisible to most outsiders. We are a wealthy country with deeply uneven wealth distribution, and the strain shows up in places we do not advertise. Older workers, deferred retirements, the silent drain of supporting parents in a culture where filial obligation is not optional, the way young couples calculate flat sizes against a thirty-year mortgage and an uncertain career, the way certain professions, hawkers, drivers, cleaners, are bearing the cost of the entire city's convenience on bodies that are wearing out faster than the GDP graphs would suggest. The deficiency in our country is not famine. It is a quieter erosion that the well-off, including most readers of essays like this one, do not see.
What I want you to take from today is not pity. I want you to take seriously the idea that a low Vitamin M state is not a moral failing, not a character flaw, and not a temporary inconvenience. It is a metabolic event. It changes the kind of person you are while you are inside it. It changes what you can think, what you can plan, who you can be to others, and how you carry your own life.
The Most Expensive State to Be In
The most expensive thing you can be is a little bit broke. Not properly poor, which has its own brutal arithmetic. A little bit broke. Permanently behind. Forever in catch-up. It is a state most of the urban world is currently in, and it is producing the cultural symptoms we have started to notice without quite naming the cause. The exhaustion that does not lift on a holiday. The bitterness underneath the politics. The small-minded scrolling. The aggressive certainty in matters that should produce humility. These are not pathologies of character. They are the predictable behavioural outputs of a population running on insufficient Vitamin M and refusing to admit it.
Tomorrow I want to look at the question that always comes up at this point in the conversation, and is more interesting than it first appears. Can you buy more of this thing.
Key Takeaways
A Vitamin M deficiency is a metabolic event, not a moral failing. It changes the person you can be while you are inside it.
Financial scarcity reduces cognitive performance by roughly the equivalent of a night without sleep, attacking the very faculties needed to escape it.
The deficiency shows up in five places: sleep, health, relationships, judgement and dignity.
The most expensive state to be in is not properly poor. It is permanently a little bit broke. The catch-up tax is invisible and enormous.
Singapore's version of this is quieter than poverty, but it is real, and it is borne disproportionately by older workers, caregivers and frontline labour.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the cognitive effect of financial scarcity on the brain?
According to research by Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir, financial scarcity reduces fluid intelligence, impulse control and planning ability by roughly the equivalent of a night without sleep. The effect is reversible when the financial pressure lifts.
Why is being a little bit broke more expensive than being poor?
Because permanent low-grade scarcity creates a catch-up tax that compounds quietly. People in this state defer the small decisions that would change their position, normalise the friction, and lose the bandwidth to escape it.
Where does a money deficiency show up in daily life?
In five places. Sleep, through the 3am wake. Health, through hypertension and deferred care. Relationships, where money is the leading cause of divorce. Judgement, through bandwidth-driven decisions like payday loans. And dignity, where the deficiency hollows out the sense of agency.
Is the Vitamin M deficiency a uniquely Singaporean issue?
No. It is a global phenomenon. The Singaporean version is distinctive because it sits inside a wealthy country and is borne disproportionately by older workers, caregivers, hawkers, drivers and cleaners.
What are the cultural symptoms of widespread financial stress?
The exhaustion that does not lift on a holiday, the bitterness underneath the politics, the small-minded scrolling, and the aggressive certainty in matters that should produce humility.
Yesterday, Day 2: Why We Need Vitamin M. Tomorrow, Day 4: Can We Buy It.
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