Hey guys, it's Non here.
Coffee in hand. Look at whatever is open in front of you right now — a plan, a room, a draft. Now ask the question almost nobody asks first: not what is missing from it, but what could be taken away. That one flipped question is the entire episode.
You might be thinking this is just about tidying up. It feels like a productivity hack. But it is actually about how your mind works. Let us look at a room that is cluttered.
A desk with papers you have not read for months. A bag full of old receipts. You look at it. You feel bad.
You want to add something. You want to add a new organizer. You want to add a new desk chair. You think, "I need this to work."
You are looking for what is missing. Ask what could be taken away. Look at your phone. You have not answered that message for three days.
You feel a knot in your stomach. You think, "I need to send a better reply." You are thinking about adding effort. You are thinking about adding a perfect sentence.
Ask what could be removed. You could put the phone in another room. You could delete the draft. The knot loosens.
You do not need to say anything. You did not add anything. You subtracted a task. That is the move.
This episode is going to chew on this subtraction. We will look at a room. Then we will look at a product. Then we will look at two years of luggage.
We will ask what can be removed before asking what is missing. It is the cheaper question and it is almost always the right one.
"So, here are my own results after a year without reading, watching, consuming any uncurated news. I didn't realize how time- consuming reading news were. Once I began to read one, I would want to go on to the next, and then the next, and then the next. Until I realized that the pot at the stove was burning.
It's addictive. So, by shutting myself completely off from social media and regular news, I have gained approximately 3 hours a day of my time back." I said that to show you what addiction looks like when it is not wrapped in a red flag. It does not always look like a struggle.
It looks like convenience. It looks like three hours of your life that just vanish. I am talking about the infinite scroll. You pick up your phone to check the weather.
You look up, and suddenly it is two hours later and you have read twenty articles about people you will never meet. You might be tempted to think the solution is to read more. You might feel like you are missing out on something. You might think, "I need to catch up on the news so I am prepared."
That is the trap. You are trying to fill a hole by adding more stuff. Jean-Paul Sartre sat in a café in Paris and watched a waiter who was doing his job too perfectly, and it bothered him for the rest of his life. The waiter treated his simple task like a theatrical performance.
He wanted to be more than a waiter. He wanted to be a "waiter" in the grand sense. He was doing what philosophers call "bad faith." It means you lie to yourself about what you are doing.
You pretend a simple action has a deeper, more important meaning than it does. You are doing bad faith with your news feed. You think you are keeping up with the world, but mostly you are just watching the waiter spin the plates. You are adding more information to a mind that is already full.
You think information is fuel, but for a while, it was just smoke. Smoke makes you feel like you are doing something, but it does not keep you warm. When I turned off the fire, I did not lose anything. I just stopped burning my wood.
You do not need to add a new system to fix this. You need to subtract the noise.
Fair enough. You might be looking at a clean desk and think, "That’s just emptiness. That’s not life." You might worry that if you stop reading the news, you stop being part of the world.
You might feel that taking things away makes you poorer, not richer. You might say, "If I didn’t know about the wars, the stock market crash, or the new restaurant opening down the street, I would be living in a cave. I would be missing out." Perhaps that is true for you.
But let’s look at where that money goes. It goes into the machine. It goes into the ads that want you to buy a car you do not need. It goes into the outrage that keeps you up at night.
It is not just information. It is a contract you sign every time you open an app. You give them your attention. In exchange, they give you a story.
You think you are the customer, but you are the product. Let’s look at what you are actually doing. You are not saving the world by reading about it. You are scrolling.
You are clicking. You are waiting for a notification. You are trading your peace of mind for the chance to be the first to tell someone you saw a headline. You are trying to be important by being the first to know.
That is not wisdom. That is just watching the waiting staff. You might feel you are protecting yourself. You are not.
You are just keeping the pot on the stove at a low boil so you do not have to look at it. You are afraid that if you turn it off, the water will stop boiling and you will feel nothing. You think you need the fire to feel alive. I did too.
I thought I needed that noise to prove I existed. But after two years of carrying less, I learned that the best view is from the quiet. The room is not empty. It is just not full of smoke.
You do not need to add anything to be enough. You just need to stop adding.
Looking at a product you are designing. You might have a list of features two pages long. You are proud of it. You are thinking about what you can add to make it sell.
You are thinking about what is missing from the experience. You are trying to build a wall and you are asking what bricks to put on top. Stop. Look at the wall.
Look at the foundation. Ask what is in the way. "Looking back, I learned so much from the 2 years of giving away stuff, having less, and 'being nobody.'" I said that to show you that removing things is not a punishment. It is how you learn what you actually need.
When I lived with less, I did not lose my knowledge. I lost the need to show off how much I knew. I lost the need to be a "Dr" to people who did not care. I just became a person on a bus.
Nobody cares if you have a Ph.D. when you are on the road. So, look at your product. Look at your service. Ask what you are trying to prove.
Are you trying to prove you are smart? Are you trying to prove you are busy? Are you trying to prove you are better than the competition? If the answer is yes, you are adding noise.
You are adding complexity. You are adding features that nobody asked for. You are doing bad faith again. You are lying to the user by giving them too much choice.
You are pretending that more is better. It is not. You might be tempted to defend the extra button. You might say, "It is there in case they need it."
That is the polite lie. If they needed it, they would have looked for it. If they found it, they would have used it. If they are not using it, it is just clutter.
It is just smoke. It costs you money to build it. It costs the user time to ignore it. Delete the button.
Cut the step. Make the path straight. The best design is often the one you do not see. Now, look at your own life.
Look at the requirement you keep for yourself. The standard you hold when nobody is watching. You might be the kind of person who thinks you have to answer every email. You might think you have to read every paper.
You might think you have to be the first to know everything. You are trying to keep the pot on the stove. You think you need the fire to feel like you are working. You might be right.
But let’s look at the cost. You are burning your wood just to keep the steam rising. You are working harder so you can say you did more. But what are you actually doing?
You are moving paper from one pile to another. You are checking a box. You are afraid that if you stop, you will be nothing. You will be nobody.
That is a scary thought. But perhaps the opposite is true. Perhaps you are nobody because you are doing too much. Perhaps you are not nobody because you have less.
You are just a person who is not full of smoke. You do not need a new goal. You just need to subtract the task. You just need to let the pot cool down.
"But, seriously, would knowing or not knowing about them make my life any better or worse?" I thought my life would be poorer without that information. But after two years of traveling almost cashlessly, I realized nobody cares if I have a Ph.D. when I am on the road. The people who matter to me do not check my credentials; they just want to know if I am safe.
So, I am left with this question. If you take away everything that is not essential—if you subtract the noise, the clutter, and the addiction to being the first to know something—what are you left with? What is the one thing that actually makes your life better, and how do you know it’s not just a story you tell yourself to feel busy?