This article will look at affect and emotional regulation in pre-oil central Arabia, attending to emotion as a social practice for dealing with uncertainty rather than an individual affect or response to ecological difficulty. It focuses on the Najd and what daily emotional life there was prior to oil: irregular rainfall, limited mobility, limited access to water, and moral aspects of hosting. Based on affect theory, the anthropology of temporality, the environmental humanities, and ordinary ethics, it creates the notion of a moral ecology of affect, an environment in which practices of patience, composure, restraint, and generosity were intertwined with aspects of everyday social life. In the article, the historical-anthropological analysis is used in conjunction with the micro-historical scene reading. Najdi chronicles are reviewed, and travel stories of Charles Doughty and H. St J. B. Philby. The scarcity in the environment is not solely material is asserted in this article. Instead, anticipatory, enduring, delaying, and reciprocative social, temporal, and affective structures emerged from ecological uncertainty. Rainfall, wells, hospitality, and caravan travelling are not only environmental phenomena but also affective infrastructures, in which processes of emotional behaviour are regulated and publicly managed. The article also suggests that emotional regulation was a social knowledge that was active rather than passive in pre-oil Arabia. The article highlighted the affective dimensions of ecological precarity in order to join broader debates on historical anthropology, temporality studies, and environmental humanities, and provided a new interpretation of everyday life in pre-oil Arabia.