A few months before my October 2009 cancer diagnosis, I read an article by Martha Beck entitled, “When and How To Say Enough” that made the baby hairs on the back of my neck stand up.

She took the concept of just-in-time (JIT) manufacturing that Toyota made famous after the Second World War and together with a group of her business students, came up with ways to apply this JIT theory to our everyday lives (as opposed to the just-in-case (JIC) philosophy that most of us subscribe to).

In the article Martha writes, “Most people live with a just-in-case mind-set because for most of human history, it made sense. The primary fact of life for just-in-case processes is: “Everything good is scarce!” By contrast, just-in-time systems rely on the assumption “Everything good is readily available.” Well, until quite recently, the former claim was true for most humans—it’s still true for many. But most magazine readers like you live in settings where basic necessities, like food, clothing, and other humans, are plentiful.

Living in an abundant environment but operating on the assumption that good things are scarce leads to a host of dysfunctions that can be summed up in one word: excess. Most of us are living in some kind of excess; we work too much, eat too much, rack up debt buying too much stuff. Yet, driven by the unconscious, just-in-case assumption that “everything good is scarce,” we just keep doing and accumulating more. We’ve all seen some of the unfortunate results.”

She goes on to hi-light the four categories in life that most of us fall into trouble with our just-in-case thinking: controlling our weight, our intense desire for financial security, our addiction to shopping and accumulating ‘stuff’, and our belief that we need to cling tightly to anyone that we love in order to prevent that person from disappointing us or disappearing from our lives. (more…)