More Isn't Always Better -- Regardless of What You're Told

There's a commercial that still makes me laugh. A comedian sits cross-legged on the floor with a group of kids — the kind of heart-to-heart circle that makes you lean in. He asks them about more. And one little girl, utterly sincere, explains it perfectly: when we like something, we want more. We want more.

She's not wrong. That's what gets me every time. The wanting is human and alive and true.

But watch her face. She hasn't finished loving the first thing before the wanting-more has already started. And I find myself wondering — not about the wanting, that part's given — but about the understanding underneath it. What is it about this thing that calls for more? How much is actually good before it tips into something else entirely?

I've been sitting with that image lately — because I think it's us.

The Age of More

But just the opposite of stillness, we've entered an era that took that impulse and turned it into an operating system. Not just more — but optimized. Maxed. Fiber maxing. Protein maxing. Joy maxing. The premise baked into all of it: there is a correct amount of everything, a threshold to hit, and your job is to find it.

We've even quantified happiness. There's a number in the research — a point on a wellbeing scale — below which recovery becomes genuinely hard. Which means somewhere along the way we stopped asking how am I doing and started asking am I above the threshold.

I came across a piece recently arguing that puttering is good for you. Unstructured time. Rest without an agenda. (Revolutionary, I know.) I was nodding along, genuinely relieved someone was saying it — until the author provided a list of approved puttering hobbies.

We cannot even let rest be unoptimized.

That's not guidance. That's the same problem wearing different clothes. Not here's what puttering might open up for you — but here are the correct ways to do the thing we're giving you permission to do. The reach for the external answer is so reflexive we can't even make space for rest without filling it with instructions.

I was reminded of a conversation I had once with someone who told me, completely earnestly, that she needed to find a hobby. So I asked her — what do you actually enjoy doing, just for yourself, just because it feels good?

She couldn't think of anything.

Not because there was nothing there. But because she'd arrived with a definition of what a hobby was supposed to look like — accumulated from somewhere, internalized so thoroughly she'd stopped questioning it — and nothing in her actual life was measuring up. The signal was there. The framework was just too loud to hear it through.

That's not a personal failing. That's what happens when we outsource the sensing for long enough.

What It's Costing Us

I noticed this in myself recently through something unglamorous — a shift in what my body actually needs nutritionally. A rule I'd followed for years, absorbed so thoroughly I'd stopped questioning whether it was actually mine, quietly stopped working. My body was changing, as bodies do, and the old formula wasn't keeping up.

My first instinct was to double down — more of the same, harder. And when that clearly wasn't the answer, to swing the other direction entirely and rebuild around whatever the current optimization landscape was selling.

Neither felt right.

So I went looking for someone to hand me the answer. And when I found it — the answer turned out to be something I'd already known.

That reflex is worth looking at. The immediate reach outward in search of the right answer, before pausing to honestly ask myself what I actually needed — and trusting what came back. I'd been so thoroughly trained to look for the framework that asking better questions of myself felt almost naive.

Like I'd be guessing when I could be optimizing.

And that's what we've quietly lost. Not motivation. Not discipline. The capacity to sense what's actually true for us — that internal knowing that requires a little stillness, a little trust, a little willingness to sit with not-knowing. Every time we reach for the external answer first, that capacity gets slightly less use.

Every time we reach for the external answer first, that capacity gets slightly less use. The way any muscle atrophies when something else keeps doing the job for it.

The way any muscle atrophies when something else keeps doing the job for it.

The Middle Is Bigger Than You Think

What I found wasn't a new rule. It was a different relationship with the question. Yes, my body needed more protein. But not maximized protein. Just more than before — calibrated to this body, at this point in my life, in this particular season of change.

The middle isn't a fixed point halfway between two extremes. It's a spacious territory — big enough to shift direction, to adjust, to respond to what's actually happening — without feeling compelled to run to the opposite wall. I could move toward something without maxing it. I could change without optimizing the change.

That's where your actual capacity lives. Not in the absence of information — the research matters, the data is real. But in the conversation between what you know from the outside and what you sense from the inside. The middle is where those two things meet, instead of one drowning out the other.

The problem isn't the little girl wanting more. The problem is when the wanting runs so far ahead of the experiencing that we never actually arrive at our own knowing.

You already have some of that. The question is whether there's enough quiet to hear it.

If this is the kind of thinking you want more of — the newsletter is where I go deeper into what becomes possible when you bring yourself back into the equation. You can sinscribe to it here:

Practically Well.