The Elegance of Less

The Courage to Discard

With every essay I write, I spend more and more time pruning and snipping, subtracting and deleting. One of my Harvard Business Review articles, for instance, went from a first draft of more than 4000 words to a published piece of 1500. What is left behind is not absence; it is clarity. And that pruning, so seemingly mundane, now strikes me as a parable for the age.

We are creatures of additive impulse. It’s in our synaptic wiring, our political promises, our economic dogmas. More jobs. More benefits. More apps. More stuff. More advice. The solution to clutter? Not to discard, but to organize it. The fix for a failing system? Bolster it. The cure for discontent? Add purpose, productivity, power.

Let us be clear: this is not a Luddite’s call to dismantle the world. Addition gave us the vaccine, the cathedral, the symphony, and the microchip. Human progress is, in many ways, an additive story. The marvel of our world is built on more. The argument is not to abandon addition, but to recognize that our unthinking, instinctual bias toward it has become a liability. We have mastered the art of adding; we are novices in the wisdom of taking away. In an era where we count steps, measure calories, stack credentials, and fetishize metrics, subtraction is not just unfashionable; it is nearly unthinkable.

Parsimony

But what if the virtue we need now is not addition but removal?

That is the essential heresy explored in recent cognitive and social science. The idea that subtraction, removing elements from a design, a plan, a schedule, a policy, is not merely an aesthetic preference or a monkish impulse toward minimalism, but a foundational and underused cognitive tool. A kind of mental Occam's Razor, not to be confused with mere austerity. It isn't about doing less for its own sake. It's about doing better by doing less.

We overlook subtraction not because it is ineffective but because it is cognitively inaccessible. A 2021 paper, People systematically overlook subtractive changes, in Nature by Adams, Converse, Hales, and Klotz demonstrated this with cruel simplicity: asked to improve objects or ideas, people overwhelmingly suggested additive solutions. Even when subtracting would clearly yield a better outcome. This isn't just a quirk of individual cognition; it may be a ghost of our evolutionary past. For a foraging ancestor, adding more food, more tools, or more allies was almost always the right answer. The instinct to acquire is primal. The findings should be galling to anyone who works in policy, design, education, or, frankly, the domestic art of decluttering a kitchen drawer.

This cognitive bias manifests as a cultural symptom. Our institutional machinery is built to reward accretion. Growth is the secular gospel of our time, its catechism recited by investors and city planner alike. Cities must “expand,” and companies must “scale.” To subtract is to risk being accused of regression, failure, or nihilism.

But there are times in history when subtraction was salvation.

Think of Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis in 1847 Vienna. Amid surging maternal mortality rates, he did not invent a new drug or procedure. He asked doctors to stop doing something: stop moving between autopsies and childbirth without washing their hands. Mortality rates plummeted. Or look at Deng Xiaoping, who dismantled the worst parts of Maoist economics not with new Marxist theory, but by quietly subtracting ideological rigidity from the machinery of the state. In both cases, progress arrived not as an addition, but as a deletion.

Closer to home, subtraction is the unheralded tool of good editors, urban planners, and even ethical parents. Take away the superfluous rule, and the child breathes. Remove one freeway, and a neighborhood reconnects. Cut a paragraph, and the argument shines.

A Mindset of Less

But subtraction is not just a method; it is a mindset. It is, in fact, a form of resistance, against bloat, against conformity, against the compulsive busy-ness of late capitalist life. To subtract is to say: I will not be governed by the tyranny of more.

In the language of computer science, our systems are chronically “overfit.” They have been so endlessly tweaked, so layered with patches and exceptions and additions, that they have become exquisitely adapted to a world that no longer exists. They are brittle. Like the impossibly complex financial models that convinced a generation of Wall Street’s best and brightest that risk had been eliminated, right up until the moment it hadn’t in 2008. The models weren’t just wrong; their very complexity was the source of their wrongness. They had memorized the noise of the past and could no longer hear the signal of the present. This is the great, terrifying paradox of our age of accumulation: our frantic efforts to build resilient systems have instead created the ideal conditions for their catastrophic collapse. For these brittle, overfit systems, the path to salvation lies not in another patch, but in a courageous deletion. A good AI neural network learns when to forget. Why do we find this so difficult?

Because removal requires a kind of courage. Addition flatters the ego; subtraction confronts it. To subtract is to admit that not every decision made before was wise. That every process, every ideology, every bureaucracy might be one obsolete feature away from collapse.

Declutter

So how do we reclaim subtraction?

We start by prompting it. In design charrettes, in policy brainstorming, in curriculum review, ask first: what can we take away? Embed subtraction as a mandatory step, not an afterthought. Reward the elegance of less. Institutionalize the wisdom of removal. Imagine a political campaign that promises not more, but less: fewer forms, fewer middle managers, fewer empty metrics. It would sound absurd. It might also be radical enough to work.

In a society trained to conflate complexity with sophistication, subtraction feels subversive. But perhaps it is time to rehabilitate absence, not as loss but as space. A pause. A silence where the next possibility can breathe.

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the modernist architect, famously said: “Less is more.” There is a wisdom in that irreverence, a willingness to cut away what is unworthy of attention, of time, of life.

To practice this is to wage a quiet, internal rebellion. It is to look at the bloated systems of our own lives, our calendars, our commitments, our possessions, our digital feeds, and to begin the difficult work of asking not “What is missing?” but “What is unnecessary?” It requires the discipline of saying no, of letting go, of seeking elegance not in adornment, but in the clean, strong lines of the essential.

In the end, this is not about austerity; it is about attention. What we remove defines what we notice. The subtraction of noise is the addition of signal. What we strip away becomes the negative space that reveals the true and lasting shape of the thing.

We have forgotten that creation is often an act of removal. The sculptor does not add to the marble; she subtracts, and in her subtraction, she defines the shape.

And perhaps, just perhaps, the true measure of our intelligence is not how much we can accumulate, but how precisely we know what to leave out.

Stay curious

Colin