Some people pride themselves on more.
How much more work they can do.
How many more tasks they can complete.
How much more stress they can tolerate.
More money, more meetings, more milestones.
More followers, more clients, more experiences.
Hustle and spend, hustle and spend.
They live in acceleration. Every waking hour is a race to do more, earn more, become more. They measure their worth in progress and productivity. They confuse motion for truth.
And on the other hand, some people pride themselves on less.
Less plans.
Less work.
Less consumption.
Less noise.
They have traded the race for restraint. They take pride in how little they own, how little they need, how slowly they move. Their peace becomes their currency, their stillness their new status.
Both more and less can be powerful tools. Used intentionally, they can take you exactly where you want to go. But used as identities, they become cages.
Both have become cultural phenomena.
They are no longer strategies, they are tribes.
They have become performances.
Signals of belonging.
We have taken what should have been personal tools
and turned them into public declarations of worth.
Neither more nor less is inherently good or bad, but when either becomes a goal in itself, it will always lead to an empty outcome.
When you do more for the sake of being seen doing more, you lose sight of why you began in the first place. When you do less simply to prove you’re above the chase, you’re still chasing — only now you’re chasing status instead of progress.
More and less have become things we talk about,
and therefore things people build identities around.
They have become an axis of morality and status.
Either you hate hustle culture, or you swear by it.
Either you love money, or you despise it.
Either you’re a maximalist, or a minimalist.
Everything has become polarized.
Everything has become personal.
Everything has become about who you are — not about where you are going.
But the moment you tie a method to your identity, you become more attached to the method than the mission. You start living to defend your approach instead of evolving toward your goal.
You end up spending more time ensuring your actions fit inside the dogma you’ve built for yourself than asking whether they’re actually working.
And slowly, you forget the only question that matters:
Are you moving closer to the life you want?
What good is it to hustle if you’re so consumed by the grind that you forget to enjoy the arrival? What good is it to work less if you never reach what you set out to do?
No philosophy, no method, no “way of life” matters
if it doesn’t bring you closer to your destination.
That’s the quiet truth most people avoid.
Not because it’s complicated,
but because it’s confronting.
It’s easier to believe in systems than in yourself.
It’s easier to think the next method will fix you
than to admit that none of them will.
So most people keep searching. They move from hustle culture to slow living, from ambition to detachment, from more to less and back again —
hoping that this time, the pendulum will land in peace.
But it never does.
Because the problem isn’t the method.
It’s the attachment.
People overvalue the method and forget the destination.
Life is not a formula. It is an uncontrollable, ever-changing landscape. No strategy, prescription, or dogma will ever give you the certainty you crave. The world shifts too fast for that.
The only true thing is the destination you want to reach.
Once you reach absolute clarity about where you’re going, your methods will crumble. They will become footnotes in the thesis of your path.
When you know exactly what you want,
your actions become obvious.
You will hustle when the road calls for it.
You will rest when the moment requires it.
You will know when to add and when to subtract.
When the goal is clear, you no longer need rules.
If you’re caught up in how little or how much, it only reveals that you are still lost. That you are still performing seriousness instead of living it. You simply don’t want it enough — not yet.
The only things worth pursuing in life are the ones you have no choice but to pursue. The ones that call you even when you’re exhausted. The ones that make you forget what “balance” even means.
Everything else is noise. Everything else only distracts you from clarity. It muddies your vision.
Nothing can stop the person who walks toward their destiny with absolute certainty.
The tragedy, of course, is that most people never reach that state. They stay stuck in methods, theories, and borrowed philosophies. They become obsessed with getting incrementally better — as if progress without arrival means anything.
They lose touch with genuine desire. They seek approval more than alignment. They live to confirm their identity instead of fulfilling their conviction.
They forget what it feels like to want something so deeply that no rulebook can contain it.
And that is a terrible fate.
To live methodically, but not meaningfully.
To optimize every inch of your life,
and still never touch your own truth.
So ask yourself:
not what method you follow,
not what improvements you can make,
but where you’re truly headed.
Everything else — more or less — is just distraction.
Sincerely,
Milo Morrison