The Art of Less

anyone can write long, spilling whatever comes to mind with no thought or care for form. but it takes discipline to cut until only the essential remains. this does not mean stripping so much that meaning is lost — context matters and explanation can turn misunderstanding into insight. every word must earn its place.

the soul of wit

brevity is clarity earned through struggle. it is the product of time spent choosing what matters and removing what does not. verbosity is the refuge of insecure writers who fear that empty space will read as shallowness.

verbosity pretends to say more, yet it often says less. empty words, jargon meant to impress rather than inform, and buzzword padding piled on to meet quotas or sound profound — these avoid the hard work of intentional writing. every line should be the result of choice, not accident.

I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.
— Blaise Pascal

brevity is often mistaken for laziness. in reality, it is usually the product of careful thought and deliberate omission. the challenge is rarely adding. it is knowing what to remove.

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

brevity is a discipline that requires you to know what you mean before you write. it is not a shortcut but a process that sharpens thought. the more you write, the more you understand what matters. the more you edit, the clearer your ideas become.

structured thought

writing is thinking. it forces order on a wandering mind, clarifies which ideas survive scrutiny, and reveals what you truly mean. to write less is not to think less. every cut is a decision.

outsourcing that work to machines is tempting but corrosive to the mind. outsourcing forfeits the struggle that gives writing its value. LLMs can polish words, but they cannot think for you. they hallucinate confidently and cannot be held accountable for their output.

we need to be more aware. the danger is not that these machines will replace us, but that we willingly replace ourselves. this makes it all the more crucial that we do not delegate the act of thinking to AI, especially by habit.

AI is not human. don’t treat it as human.

minimal means

code is another form of writing. it scales in complexity, and the cost of mistakes grows quadratically with project size. more code creates more surface area for bugs and greater difficulty reasoning about the system.

brevity here does not mean cryptic shorthand. code is read more often than it is written — usually by your future self. concise, clear code reduces cognitive load. the best tools and patterns are those that let us express more with less.

living with less

brevity is more than a craft of writing or coding. it is a discipline of life. conciseness is the respect you pay to those who come after you, including yourself. abundance without intent becomes clutter. more often leaves us with less of what truly matters — less attention, less energy, less peace.

our culture rewards volume over depth. quality drowns under quantity. more content, more code, more output, more features, more everything. the result is exhaustion from decision fatigue, paralysis from too many choices, and distraction without fulfillment.

to live with less is not absence but choice. it is deciding what to cut so that what remains can breathe. it demands patience to delay gratification, discipline to stay mindful of what you take in and put out, and courage to resist the pull of distraction.

less is not an end in itself. it is the ground on which something greater can grow. it is the practice of saying ‘no’ to the trivial so you can say ‘yes’ to the essential. it is the art of making space for what truly matters.