Genuinely Happy People Do Less
Finding Clarity in the Power of Via Negativa
When you spend time with genuinely happy people you start to notice something: They are doing less.
Get close and it’s obvious there’s less going on. Less calls, less to-dos. Fewer obligations tying them down. They aren’t optimizing for some new productivity hack. And, they are definitely not in endless meetings.
But are they actually doing less? Sort of.
The reality is they are just doing less “busy work.” Their attention is on maximizing the time for thinking, understanding and clarifying. If they have to work it’ll be the deep work that gets them closer to their dreams. They cut out the distractions. Happy people have figured out what the cold-plunge-bio-hackers are still trying to understand — optimizing for productivity is a waste of valuable time.
Energy For The Right Things
Turns out, doing more doesn’t earn you any more happiness. Hacking your life for more time to be productive is counter productive. Read that again.
The good life is about subtraction.
When you’re young and full of piss and vinegar, it’s feels like you’ll never run out of energy. Your assumption then is to work like a professional athlete in the hope that more will create more. While this is possible for short periods of time, it’s not sustainable. It leads to burnout.
But burnout isn’t just about working too hard. Burnout happens when you work on the the wrong things. When you work on the wrong things, those things drain you. Like optimizing for productivity.
Happy people seek clarity, not productivity.
From clarity emerges focus. The focus to work on the right things. Doing less opens up both the creative channels to know what the right things are, and it energizes the body to work on those things.
Via Negativa: Subtraction as Growth
There’s a story about a man who asked his gardener why the plants grew so beautifully. The gardener said, “I don’t force them to grow. I remove what stops them.”
This is the essence of via negativa — the path of subtraction. Instead of piling on new fixes, new supplements, new hacks, it asks: what can you remove? Which obstacles, habits, or stories are holding you back?
I have applied the Via Negativa concept to my own life. In fact I’m in a major phase of purging all the things that no longer serve me (including some relationships that I’ve outgrown).
Each of you will be in different seasons of you life, and such the questions will be subtly different. But, we’re all wondering the same things. Might I live longer? Might I be wiser? Could I find more joy or happiness or energy? In the context of these curiosities, there are several questions worth asking.
- What do you do that unnecessarily ages your body?
- Which activities drain your energy or corrode your self-respect?
- Which relationships diminish rather than nourish you?
- What things do I own, actually own me?
Using these guiding queries I realized that I was doing way more than was necessary. For example, I was working out at the same tempo that I had when I was much younger. Smashing the gym and the bike 5–6 times a week was just making me tired, not stronger. Not only was this time-consuming but it wasn’t adding anything to my physical health.
The real health improvements came from taking things away from my routines. Instead of 5 times a week, I work out 3–4 times a week now and that makes time for long walks. I stopped drinking alcohol and I cut out watching TV on week nights. Sustainable changes that made a bigger difference to my health than hitting the gym every day. The best part was I just felt less urgent. Mental space opened up and felt more relaxed.
Instead of wondering what supplement to add, what gym routine to sign up for, or what heart-tracking device you need to buy, consider what you can drop from the routine. Drink less alcohol. Eat less food. Watch less TV.
By removing these, you create the conditions for renewal. Subtract your way to health. You don’t force growth. You allow it.
The Courage of Subtraction
My personal clarity often shows up as subtraction. It’s not about adding more commitments, more research, more validation. It’s about stopping myself and asking if I really need more of whatever to feel happier. Sometimes it’s a simple as asking, “Do I really need to make this decision now?” or just waiting 24 hours before hitting the checkout button. The agency over these choices feels like freedom, because it is a for of freedom.
This is why so many people feel more alive in their 40s and 50s than they did in their 20s. It’s not because the body has improved — it’s because the unnecessary burdens have been stripped away. They’ve stopped trying to be who they thought they should be and started becoming who they are.
The courage to say no is the foundation of saying yes to what matters. The clarity to remove the wrong things is what makes space for the right things.
Any personal or professional transformation is rarely about adding more. It’s about returning to less. Less distraction, less noise, less compromise, less pretending. And what remains is the most powerful clarity of all: a life that feels like one you want to live.
