Spending to feel better about being broke has a name. It's scarcity spending, and it charges you twice for the same fear.

The thought behind it

It names a feeling you have carried for years without vocabulary. Naming does not dissolve it, but it makes it addressable. It sits in Money Mind because it treats spending as a symptom, and symptoms are worth reading before they are treated. “scarcity” is doing the work: it is where the line stops describing you and starts asking something.