The Art of Less

the soul of wit

brevity is clarity bought with time. anyone can write long, but it takes discipline to cut until only the essential remains. it does not mean stripping context so much that meaning is lost — explanation is often necessary to avoid misunderstanding.

the real clutter is empty words that take up space, jargon meant to impress rather than inform, and buzzwords or padding piled on to meet quotas or sound profound.

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 removal.

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

the same discipline appears in any craft. the challenge is rarely adding, but knowing what to remove.

structured thought

writing is thinking. it forces order on a wandering mind, clarifies which ideas survive scrutiny, and reveals what you truly feel.

outsourcing that work to machines is tempting but corrosive to the mind. LLMs can polish words, but they cannot think for you. they hallucinate freely with confidence and cannot be accountable for what they generate.

to write is to shape the self. it is crucial that we do not delegate the act of thinking to AI, especially by habit.

remember, AI is not 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 means more surface for bugs, and more difficulty in reasoning.

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.

reflections

brevity is more than a craft of writing or coding. it is a discipline of life.

in a world that rewards volume over depth, quality is drowned by quantity. more content, more output, more code, more features, more everything. we become exhausted with decision fatigue, overwhelmed with analysis paralysis, and unfulfilled by endless distraction.

to live with less is not absence, but intentional restraint: patience with delayed gratification, discipline to stay mindful of what we take in and put out, and courage to resist distraction. it is the practice of saying “no” to the trivial so we can say “yes” to the essential.