The wisdom of less

We human beings seem to have a chronic addition bias. When something is wrong, our instinct is to add: more words, more meetings, more analysis, more features, more possessions, more interventions, more emotion, more money, more effort. 

We rarely ask whether the intelligent move is subtraction.

Shakespeare recommended brevity as the soul of wit. But being brief is just one manifestation of the problem. The larger proposition is that much of wisdom sits in knowing when not to add. This idea has so much travel in human life.

Thinking: We imagine more thought always produces a better decision. Past a point, thought becomes rumination. You can think yourself away from what you already know.

Communication: We explain, clarify, qualify, caveat, repeat. Often the strongest sentence was the first one. Everything after it dilutes the signal.

Leadership: Leaders add initiatives, priorities, metrics, committees, meetings. Almost nobody gets promoted for saying, “We should stop doing seven things.”

Consumption: We think abundance is the answer to scarcity, and keep adding possessions to solve discomforts—created partly by having too many possessions. 

Self-improvement: More habits, more routines, more supplements, more podcasts, more tests, more meds. Eventually life itself becomes a treadmill of loading more remedies while standing still.

And, perhaps more potently, Emotion: We don’t merely feel the natural disappointments of our lives. We narrate them, revisit them, amplify them, prosecute them internally, repeatedly. The original pain acquires compound interest, and hurts even decades later.

Does nature itself not tell us not to do this? Restraint is a natural part of life. A garden requires pruning. Sleep repairs us by shutting activity down. Muscle growth requires recovery periods, not merely exertion. Memory requires the forgetting of things that should be left behind. Conversation requires silence on the part of someone.

Perhaps we should pay more attention to these natural restraints. Growth does not always come from adding. Sometimes it comes from removing, reducing, resting, forgetting, stopping.

The trick, of course, is knowing when enough has become too much. That may be one of the quieter forms of wisdom: not asking what else you can add, but what you can now leave out.

In keeping with the spirit of today’s Signal, I’ll end it here.

THE SIGNAL IN THE NOISE

The smartest addition may be a subtraction.

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And in in the spirit of repair, the Signal takes a mid-year break. Back on 13 September.

 

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