Musings
More Is Less: The Cultural Shift Nobody Named Yet
We’ve been told for decades that less is more.
Minimalism gave us white walls and capsule wardrobes and the satisfying theatre of the declutter. Marie Kondo asked us what sparked joy. The tiny house movement asked us how little we could live with. It was useful. It was necessary. But it was, in some ways, still a performance. Still about the objects. Still, underneath it all, about curating an image.
What I’m noticing now is something different. Something quieter and more interior.
More is less.
Not less is more, the aesthetic principle. More is less, the lived experience of what happens when you keep adding things to your life and find yourself, paradoxically, with less. Less energy. Less time. Less of yourself. Less of the feeling that anything actually matters.
It’s showing up everywhere, once you know to look for it.
In the way people talk about their social media feeds, not just the volume of content but the quality of attention they’re able to bring to anything. The more they consume, the less they actually feel. The scroll produces a kind of fullness that is actually a form of emptiness. People are recognising this now in their bodies before their minds have caught up.
It’s showing up in fitness culture. After years of more, more sessions, more protein, more metrics, more optimisation, something is shifting. People are asking: am I actually enjoying this? Does this make me feel more like myself or less? The rise of walking, of swimming, of slow yoga, of movement that has no performance target attached to it, this is not laziness. This is intelligence. The body knows when it’s been turned into a project.
It’s showing up in the way people are choosing objects. Not fewer objects for the aesthetic pleasure of fewer objects, but fewer objects because each one is now expected to mean something. A handmade mug. A piece of clothing worn because it feels like you, not because it’s this season. An altar on a windowsill with three things on it that actually hold weight.
More stuff produces less connection. Less stuff, chosen with care, produces more.
What interests me is where this is going spiritually.
The traditions that have always understood this, yoga, Buddhism, Stoicism, Quakerism, the Desert Fathers, all arrived at roughly the same place from different directions. Simplicity is not deprivation. It is a clearing. When you remove what is merely habitual, what is merely anxious accumulation, what has been added because adding things feels like control, you find something underneath.
You find what is actually yours.
The chakra system speaks to this directly. Each energy centre, when it’s working well, is characterised not by abundance in the accumulative sense but by sufficiency. Enough groundedness. Enough creativity. Enough confidence. Enough love. The system is not asking you to have more. It’s asking you to notice what you already have, and to stop blocking it with what you don’t need.
More is less. Less becomes more.
Not as a design principle. Not as a lifestyle brand. As something you feel in your body when you finally stop filling the space and let yourself just be in it.
That’s the practice. That’s always been the practice.
The world is catching up.