Advanced Techniques in Being Less Advanced

My friend's (let's call him Gallant) junk drawer contained exactly three items: a screwdriver, a pair of scissors, and a notepad. When I asked him about this unconventional interpretation of a junk drawer—traditionally a chaotic repository of forgotten odds and ends—he shrugged and said, "Why keep what you won't use?" This moment lives in my memory as a masterclass in the poetry of refusal[1], a reverse-engineered zen koan that becomes more philosophically perplexing the longer you consider it. (If a junk drawer contains nothing unnecessary, is it still a junk drawer? Gallant, who once spent three hours explaining to me why he didn't own a television, would have appreciated the paradox.)

I've been thinking about Gallant's drawer—which, incidentally, remained exactly the same until he moved away last year, its three items arranged with such mathematical precision that it was less like storage and more like an art installation—while watching our mutual friend Goofus construct what he calls his "weekend project tracking system." It involves three whiteboards, seventeen color-coded markers, and an elaborate matrix of sticky notes coordinated by both size and hue. Goofus spends approximately four hours each Friday evening planning his weekend projects, two hours each Monday morning reviewing what he accomplished, and presumably some portion of the weekend actually doing things[2]. When I mentioned Gallant's drawer, he looked at me as though I'd suggested he take up competitive sock-sorting, then immediately created a new category in his system for "potential hobby evaluation metrics."

But what struck me as interesting—and by "interesting" I mean in the way the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle becomes interesting when you realize that observing a particle fundamentally changes its behavior, which is coincidentally exactly what happens when you begin to observe your own productivity systems: Goofus's elaborate scaffolding of time management, with all its beautiful complexity[3], represents the same fundamental impulse as Gallant's drawer. Both are attempts to impose order on the chaos of possibility. The difference lies not in the goal but in the approach—addition versus subtraction, accumulation versus curation. Goofus builds elaborate scaffolding around his time while Gallant carved away at his until only the essential remained, as if a sculptor discovering the statue by removing everything that isn't it.

We mistake abundance for possibility, a cognitive error so fundamental to modern existence it probably deserves entry in DSM. We confuse having options with having direction, which is like pretending that owning a comprehensive atlas means you're well-traveled[4]. Every morning, our group chat lights up with Goofus's latest discoveries: newsletters promising to teach Sanskrit (a language he's attempted to learn exactly three times, each attempt ending at precisely the point where the scripts begin to look less like beautiful calligraphy and more like evidence of his intellectual limitations), urban beekeeping (an endeavor that seems simultaneously noble and mildly terrifying), advanced origami (which I'm convinced is just geometry masquerading as art), and twenty-seven other skills we've somehow survived without. Each one whispers of transformation, of becoming someone more accomplished, more interesting, more complete—as if selfhood were a software package perpetually awaiting updates.

Meanwhile, Gallant lives in a small town in Vermont now, in a house with more windows than storage space. He posts on social media roughly once per season, each update a small masterpiece of concision. Last winter, he sent a package containing a single perfect maple leaf and a note that read, "Thought you'd appreciate this." No explanation, no context, no suggestion that I should start collecting leaves or move to Vermont or develop an appreciation for amateur botany[5].

The mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal once apologized for writing a long letter, saying he hadn't had time to write a short one, which might be the most elegant articulation of the central paradox of reduction ever composed[6]. This paradox—reduction requires more skill than addition—extends beyond writing into every conceivable domain of human activity. It applies to decisions, to possessions, to commitments, to the very architecture of our days. Gallant's drawer wasn't empty because he lacked opportunities to fill it; it was empty because he'd mastered the art of non-accumulation, a practice more radical with each passing year of technological acceleration.

Consider the practice of maintaining a "no list"—a record not of tasks to complete but of distractions refused, opportunities declined. Each entry represents a moment of chosen focus, a deliberate narrowing of possibility[7]. The list grows not by accumulation but by elimination, each "no" creating space for a deeper "yes." My own no-list reads something like a spreadsheet of alternate universes: declined to join Goofus's "Personal Growth Acceleration Squad" (despite his insistence that it would "revolutionize my approach to skill acquisition"), refused invitation to join local theater group (despite secret Broadway aspirations that persist despite my complete lack of singing ability), said no to writing true-crime podcast scripts (a fascinating intersection of linguistic forensics and true crime that involved solving cold cases through analysis of perpetrators' grammar mistakes in ransom notes, which I still occasionally daydream about during particularly tedious meetings).

This mirrors the creative process in unexpected ways, or perhaps entirely expected ways if you subscribe to the theory that all human endeavor is fundamentally an act of elimination—which, come to think of it, might explain why writers often speak of finding their voice by identifying what they won't write about[8]. Painters discover their style by eliminating techniques they won't use. Even scientists progress by ruling out hypotheses, their understanding deepening with each eliminated possibility, which suggests that knowledge itself might be less about accumulation and more about strategic elimination of ignorance.

The counterintuitive truth—and I use "counterintuitive" here in its fullest sense, meaning not just contrary to intuition but actively wrestling with it in a way that makes both parties uncomfortable—is this: our potential expands not through constant addition but through strategic subtraction. Each unnecessary commitment we shed creates space for depth in what remains. Each distraction we eliminate allows us to sink deeper into what matters. Consider the professional juggler who, paradoxically, becomes more impressive not by adding more balls to their routine but by perfecting the manipulation of fewer objects[9]—the three-ball cascade executed with such precision and grace that it transcends mere trick to become art, which I witnessed firsthand in San Francisco where a street performer held an entire crowd spellbound with just three orange balls and a depth of skill making basic physics seem optional.

Last week, Goofus—who, I should mention, has recently added a color-coded subsystem for tracking the efficiency of his tracking system, and when I pointed out the potential infinite regression of this approach, he added a new category of sticky notes specifically for tracking meta-tracking concerns—invited me to join his newly formed "Productivity Enhancement Group," which meets biweekly to discuss time management strategies[10]. I declined, adding another entry to my no-list. That evening, I read through some old emails from Gallant, including one that contained nothing but a photograph of his shadow on fresh snow and the question "When did you last watch yourself disappear?" The irony wasn't lost on me—by saying no to a productivity meeting, I'd created space for an experience that would actually enhance my productivity, albeit in ways no spreadsheet could capture. Consider: If you have 10 hours and 10 possible activities, saying no to 7 of them doesn't leave you with 3 hours—it leaves you with 10 hours to divide among 3 activities. The mathematics of attention operate on rules of multiplication rather than addition.

Time bends strangely around the practice of elimination. In college, Goofus and Gallant were roommates, their shared space a perfect laboratory for observing contrasting approaches to possibility. Goofus's side of the room buzzed with potential energy: half-completed project notebooks, programming languages he was teaching himself, instruments in various stages of mastery. Gallant's side contained a bed, a desk, and a wall decorated with a single, constantly changing photograph[11]. They were both seeking the same thing: a way to make sense of the overwhelming abundance of possibility that comes with youth. Each chose a different path through that abundance, and watching them diverge over the years has been like watching two different approaches to existence play out in real time.

The question of what to eliminate becomes more pressing as our digital lives expand exponentially, a phrase which still fails to capture the true velocity of information acceleration in our current moment. We're all unwitting participants in a massive experiment testing the limits of human attention and choice-making capacity[12]. Social media feeds algorithmically generate infinite scrolls of content, each post carefully calibrated to seem just interesting enough to keep us engaged—Goofus recently showed me an internal metric they use at his tech company called "attention engagement percentage," which might be the most dystopian phrase I've encountered since learning about "engagement optimization algorithms." Meanwhile, Gallant's out-of-office reply reads simply: "In the woods until further notice. Emergency contacts below." The contrast couldn't be starker, yet both are responses to the same fundamental problem: how to remain human in an age of infinite possibility.

I've started applying both of their lessons to various aspects of my life, finding my own path between Goofus's enthusiastic accumulation and Gallant's purposeful elimination. My morning routine. My bookshelf. My relationships. With each iteration, the question remains the same: "Why keep what you won't use?" Recently, I emptied my own desk drawer—a task I'd been avoiding for months. Among the expected detritus, I found an old photograph of Goofus and Gallant at graduation, standing together but looking in different directions. It took me years to understand that the most important things we own aren't in our drawers at all—they're in the spaces we deliberately leave empty, the possibilities we refuse to clutter with lesser versions of themselves. We are defined not by what we keep, but by what we have the courage to release.