Not Everything We Value Needs to Be Maximized
When something matters, our instinct is often to give it more. The harder question is how much more allows it to remain part of a good life.
Lately, I have been giving more time to writing.
It does not advance the career I already have in any obvious way. Nobody asked me to do it, there is no credential at the end, and I don’t know what it will eventually become. I simply find that I want to think more carefully, follow ideas further than I normally would, and make something from what I am learning.
That feels like ambition to me.
But it has also made me notice something about ambition that I had not thought about much before. Once I decide that something matters, my instinct is to make more of it. Get better at it. Give it more time. See how far it can go.
That instinct has served me well. Effort created opportunities. Saving created security. Learning created capability. I am not particularly interested in learning how to care less.
What I am questioning is an assumption hidden inside all that effort.
If something is important, does it follow that I should maximize it?
Writing makes the question surprisingly concrete. If writing is worthwhile, perhaps I should publish more often. If people read it, perhaps I should grow the audience. If the project becomes meaningful, perhaps I should see how large it could become.
Nothing is wrong with any of those possibilities.
But they answer a different question from whether writing matters to me.
The harder question is: How much of it do I actually want?
When better quietly becomes maximum
Think about something you would like to keep doing for a long time.
Hiking is a simple example. If you love it, becoming fitter and trying more difficult trails can be part of the enjoyment. But if part of what you want is to be walking trails ten or twenty years from now, the highest mountain available today is only one measure of success. Preserving the body that lets you continue is another.
Food works differently. Enjoying good food does not require every meal to become an occasion. In fact, part of what makes an extraordinary meal extraordinary may be that ordinary meals are allowed to remain ordinary.
Relationships are more complicated, but the question of degree appears there too. If someone matters deeply to us, more proximity and more involvement can sound obviously better. Sometimes they are. At other times, enough independence is precisely what allows affection to remain generous rather than obligatory.
The common thread is not moderation.
It is duration.
There are things we value not only because we want more of them now, but because we hope they remain available to us for years. Once that matters, the objective changes.
The question is no longer simply, How much can I get from this?
It becomes, What way of doing this allows it to last?
The attraction of the maximum
There is something seductive about the idea of the best.
Psychologist Barry Schwartz and his colleagues studied what they called maximizing: the tendency to seek the best possible option rather than one that is good enough. Across several samples, stronger maximizing tendencies were associated with more regret and lower life satisfaction, alongside other differences. The research does not show that maximizing causes unhappiness, nor does it suggest that we should stop seeking excellent outcomes when the stakes justify it. It does suggest that the pursuit of the best is not psychologically free.
I find that distinction useful well beyond the choices in those studies.
Many of us become very good at recognizing whether something is valuable and remain much less practiced at deciding what degree of it is enough.
Once health matters, for example, it can become another optimization project. Exercise acquires measurements, targets and increasingly elaborate routines until supporting life starts consuming a substantial part of life.
Financial security can behave similarly. The first increments of saving may transform a person’s options. Much later, the habit of improving the number can continue even when the next increment creates relatively little new freedom.
We do not have to stop caring about either health or money to notice the pattern.
Caring deeply about something and pushing it indefinitely in the same direction are different decisions.
That distinction matters because almost anything can become the new object of optimization.
We can leave behind career obsession and become obsessed with health. We can stop optimizing money and start optimizing leisure. We can turn family, travel, learning or even simplicity itself into another thing that must be done perfectly.
The scoreboard changes.
The habit of keeping score can remain.
Intensity is not the problem
There is an easy way to misunderstand this argument.
A sustainable life can start to sound like a permanently moderate one: never work too hard, never become consumed by a project, always preserve perfect balance.
I don’t find that especially compelling.
There are periods when imbalance is entirely reasonable. A difficult project may deserve three unusually intense months. Starting something new may temporarily take evenings that would normally belong elsewhere. Delayed gratification can be a perfectly sensible choice when the objective matters enough.
I have never been particularly persuaded by the idea that every week of a good life must be balanced.
The distinction I care about is not between intensity and ease.
It is between intensity and depletion.
Temporary imbalance can be worthwhile precisely because it is temporary. You put more into something for a period and recover afterwards. The bargain changes when an arrangement that was supposed to be exceptional quietly becomes permanent, particularly when its cost is a capacity you cannot easily rebuild.
A demanding season at work is not automatically a problem. Years of chronic exhaustion are a different proposition. Training hard can improve physical capacity; repeatedly training through damage can eventually reduce it. A relationship can ask a great deal of us at times without requiring one person to remain permanently depleted.
I do not have a formula for exactly where temporary sacrifice becomes too much. I suspect the line moves between people and between stages of the same person’s life.
That uncertainty does not make the distinction useless.
It simply means the judgment has to remain alive.
Leaving room is part of the design
For much of a building life, unused capacity can feel like waste.
An empty hour looks available for something productive. Money that could be working harder appears inefficient. Capability that is not being exercised can feel like an opportunity left on the table.
I am less convinced now.
Some unused capacity is what allows a life to absorb change.
A calendar with some room can accommodate something important without immediately throwing the whole week into triage. A body that is not permanently pushed to its limit has space to recover. A relationship in which two people retain some independence has room for both people to keep changing.
That is one parallel I think is worth taking seriously: margin is not necessarily waste.
It is easy to see this in systems outside our own lives. A business operating permanently at full capacity becomes fragile when something unexpected happens. A financial plan with no room for error may be beautifully efficient until one assumption changes.
Yet we often admire the same lack of margin when it appears in a person.
A completely full calendar looks important. A body pushed hard looks disciplined. A career taking every available ounce of ambition looks committed.
Sometimes those descriptions are accurate.
Sometimes we are simply looking at a system with no room left in it.
The point is not to make everything smaller. It is to stop assuming that every important part of life should operate at the maximum available setting.
Having capacity and being required to use all of it are not the same thing.
The right amount is allowed to change
There is another reason I hesitate to prescribe an ideal degree of ambition, work, exercise, closeness or simplicity.
Our needs change.
Something that deserved a great deal of life at thirty may deserve less at fifty. Something neglected for years may need much more attention now. A person who spent decades building financial security may eventually value another increment of free time more than another increment of wealth.
Two years later, the answer may change again.
I don’t see that as inconsistency. It is what happens when a life keeps moving.
Enough, then, is probably not one permanent setting that we eventually discover and lock in. It is enough room to reconsider the allocation.
That is one reason the idea of “more” still interests me.
The question is not whether more is good or bad. More health may be exactly what someone needs. More work may be deeply satisfying. More time with another person may be the thing they will later be most grateful they chose.
But even after we decide that something deserves more, there is still another judgment to make.
How much more?
A question worth carrying
So I am trying a slightly different question when I decide that something deserves more of my life.
Not simply:
Do I want more of this?
But:
What amount of this allows it to remain something I want?
That question does not give me a formula.
It does something more useful.
It separates value from maximum.