On Letting Go
At the recommendation of a good friend, I have decided to write a blog post to accompany a video I recently stitched together of my Big Sur camping trip. He insisted that I could ruminate further on ideas presented in the video with a written response. This is me attempting to do just that. Although the video in question focuses on the scenery and adventures I had in the awe-inspiring Ventana Wilderness, there is one point where I go on a short tirade on the subject of letting go. So let’s talk about that a bit more.
Let me tell you the story of a boy abandoned at birth. His parents were young college students in love whose families wouldn’t allow their union to be legitimate, and so, they had to let their baby boy go. Steve, as he would later be named, would be adopted by two loving parents, Paul and Clara Jobs. I’m sure many of you are familiar with his story, but perhaps not so much about the ascetic lifestyle he led. He learned early on that letting go was the key to a happy life.
Letting go of things is never easy and everyone is privy to its inconveniences. We can all be hoarders at times. Whether we’re holding onto mementos like a birthday card, beloved items such as an article of clothing we only wear once a year, or on the deepest level, to being afraid to let go of who we are. The question which must first be asked is why is it so hard to let go?
We can begin by speculating on the possible evolutionary reasons for our tendency to hold onto things. In Hal Arkowitz’ article in Salon, he writes that behavior associated with hoarding is present among a host of species including honeybees, crows, rodents, and monkeys raising “the possibility that the condition reflects a naturally selected urge to stockpile resources for times of scarcity” (Arkowitz). However, we live in a world without much scarcity, so perhaps, one can also deduce that tribal social orders and hierarchies were better maintained when individuals didn’t let go of their roles every so often forcing the entire tribe to reorganize itself. Again, this is just speculation.
Moving on from evolutionary conjecture, one can look at an even bigger phenomenon in today’s society for a plausible answer to why we find it difficult to let go: The propensity for individuals to take the easy route. For the same reason we open up Netflix instead of books, listen to music instead of podcasts, perhaps we hold on to things because it is easy to do so. For the easy path is the path of comfort.
It is what we are used to which brings us comfort and the act of letting go means having to abandon just that. This is why people often find it difficult to leave home for foreign and strange places and oft do we see those individuals who attempt such a feat returning home to the comfort of their childhood memories. Holding onto what is comfortable is also the reason for stress and worry during tumultuous times such as during an economic recession or a bad breakup, because the life you are accustomed to gets flipped upside down and you are left having to figure everything out once again. Who said life was easy.
Getting back to Steve, if you read his biography, it’ll become immediately aware that Jobs seemed to avoid comfort. He lived a simple, yet austere lifestyle. He was always on some kind of strict dietary regimen from veganism to his fruitarian diet where he would only eat carrots and apples. Some friends even reported him to have an orange tint to his skin at these times. Additionally, he’d frequently partake in fasts shunning food altogether. What should be evident by now, is that Jobs was very proficient at letting go — and it wasn’t just in the dietary areas of his life.
Even after he became a multimillionaire Jobs avoided acquiring new things. In his home, he’d only have a lamp, a bed, and his Apple computer. Partly because he was a perfectionist, but also because he avoided unnecessary things. Why have something if you won’t use it much.

It even took Jobs nine years, after publicly denying paternity in the past, before he reconciled his relationship with his first daughter Lisa. She was very much aware of his minimalistic lifestyle, as Walter Isaacson writes in his biography of Jobs, “even at a young age Lisa began to realize his diet obsessions reflected a life philosophy, one in which asceticism and minimalism could heighten subsequent sensations. ‘He believed that great harvests came from arid sources, pleasure from restraint,’ she noted.” The important take away is just because the modern era offers us boundless luxuries, doesn’t mean we should indulge ceaselessly like gluttonous robots.
I don’t blame anyone who decides to cling onto what’s comfortable. I mean hell, who doesn’t want to be comfortable? But the hard route, the path filled with toil and the unknown is the path that should be embraced because it is in the rough where diamonds are born. Jobs experienced this first-hand when he was ousted from his own company only about 10 years after it’s foundation. He reported it as being a very hard and painful time, but it turned out to be one of the greatest things to happen to him. It was that experience and the things he’d do away from Apple which cultivated Jobs into the man and CEO he’d need to be to take Apple back from the dead at the turn of the century to become the trillion dollar behemoth it is today.
There are other geniuses who weathered hardship to become great. Ludwig van Beethoven, one of the worlds greatest pianist, was struck with deafness at the young age of 28, yet three years later he composed Moonlight Sonata’s 3rd Movement. Elon Musk was pushed down a flight of stairs and beaten as a kid, but now he’s literally single-handedly changing the course of humanity. And finally Friedrich Hölderin, the German romantic poet who greatly influenced the idealistic movement of the late 18th century, had a mental breakdown in his late 20’s, however, today his works are widely considered the highest points of German literature. More on the hard path in another post, for the time being just note that taking the road less traveled will always be difficult but it will set you way beyond everyone else. Now back to why it is so negative to hold on to things.
I’d like to get metaphysical for a second and talk about space and time. The thing I hate the most about holding on to things is the space it takes in your brain; space which can be used for other things such as thinking, being creative, learning, etc. Not to mention, freeing up “space” in your life also gives you more time. Let’s take Einstein as an example, the man who discovered the space-time continuum. In his later years, he wore the same grey suit every day so he wouldn’t have to waste any time thinking about what to wear. This is known as avoiding “decision fatigue” which is the process of being mentally worn from having to make mental choices. What is interesting to note, is the simple act of not deciding what to wear in the morning is practiced by many of the world’s geniuses. Just think of our good friend Steve Jobs who sported the same black turtleneck in his later years.
There’s a reason for this. Not worrying about how to fit in saves you a lot of thinking time. How much? Well, let’s suppose that the average person spends just 5 minutes deciding what to wear each morning (although it pains me to think that this number may be much higher among my peers today). If we start at the ripe age of 18 and go to the average age of death of 78, we get 60 years. Or 262,800 days. Which means the average person would spend 1,314,000 minutes pondering what to put on in his or her life. That is equivalent to 21,900 hours, 912,5 days or two and a half years wasted trying to decide whether you should wear the blue shirt versus the white one. Putting things in the big picture can really be damming.
All this leads to the contemporary idea of information overload which is a term used to describe the difficulty of understanding an issue and effectively making decisions when one has too much information about the issue (Wikipedia). If one really thinks about it, on the most fundamental level we are all just informational processing machines. We take in sensory inputs; visual perception, auditory, touch, etc. and then we process this information with our already held beliefs and schemas before finally outputting it in the form of behavior and actions. We become agents in the world. Furthermore, like all machines, we have our limits. Take Dunbar’s number as an example. Anthropologist Robin Dunbar posited 150 as the cognitive limit to the number of people you can maintain stable social relations with (Wikipedia). Beyond that things just get blurry. This alludes to the idea that the amount of information you expose yourself to is very important. Especially today where the bombardment of photos, articles, and videos on our many apps keep us incessantly distracted, clogging our thinking abilities. This is a very big reason for why I personally haven’t used social media all that much (although I’m trying to take better control of it), but that’s a diatribe I’ll save for another day.
Getting back to the topic at hand; letting go, decluttering, minimizing, whatever you want to call it is something we should all seriously consider taking time to practice. Decreasing the information you absorb in your day-to-day life is not just practical, but paramount. We should all try and reduce the “decision fatigue” in our lives. It is a skill which should be taught to our students, at least those who want to succeed in this world.
Not yet convinced? Allow me to enlighten you further. In 2000, psychologist Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper conducted a study wherein they placed a jam display at an upscale food market. Customers could sample any number of the jams and would then receive a $1 coupon in case they wanted to purchase one. On the first day they placed 24 different varieties of jams and on the second they only had 6 jams. Can you guess the results? The larger display attracted more people, but people were only one-tenth as likely to purchase a jam as with the smaller display (3% compared to a 30% purchase rate). What the study shows is that more options (i.e. information) lead to dissatisfaction and “choice paralysis”. As Barry Schwartz says in his article “More Isn’t Always Better”, more choices “requires increased time and effort and can lead to anxiety, regret, excessively high expectations, and self-blame if the choices don’t work out.”(Schwartz)
Still think I’m peddling snake oil? Let’s see what brain scientist Jeff Stibel has to say about the subject. In one of his article’s in USA Today he describes an experiment done by Angelika Dimoka, director of the Center of Neural Decision making at Temple University, wherein she placed subjects in an fMRI and had them solve complex problems. As the amount of information increased the prefrontal cortex became more active until, “at a certain point, the participants simply couldn’t handle any more information, and their prefrontal cortexes went dark. Like an overloaded circuit, the brain simply shuts down when presented with too much information. Information overload, it seems, is a real phenomenon in our brains” (Stibel). Not only are these findings true, but less choice actually leads to more satisfaction since we’re able to feel more confident about the decision we do end up making.
In our age of information everywhere you look there is some form of content to be consumed. I can spend an entire essay talking about how the technology companies of Silicon Valley have been fighting each other for your attention (clickbait, dopamine-releasing features such as endless scrolling, etc.) but I honestly don’t have the patience and I feel like you get the picture (at least Google finally does) — this shit is addicting and every little piece of minimization will go a long way!
Jobs was fully aware of this and made simplicity part of Apple’s brand identity — “simplicity is the ultimate sophistication” became their motto — and it’s the ease of use of Apple’s products which has set it apart from all of its competitors. It is one of the most important driving forces behind Apple. All one has to do is look at Apple’s past, to its greatest innovations, and they’ll notice a key factor that has made Apple great. Letting go.
From dropping the floppy disk in the release of the 1984 Macintosh, getting rid of the physical keyboard in the first generation iPhone, to letting go of a decade-long feud with Microsoft in 1997. This last one was monumental, the crowd both booed and cheered as Jobs announced the new partnership at the 1997 Macworld, but ultimately it was the smart decision to make. As Jobs said himself:
“If we want to move forward and see Apple healthy and prospering again, we have to let go of a few things here. We have to let go of this notion that for Apple to win, Microsoft has to lose.”
This kind of simplification can be applied to all aspects of your life, from de-cluttering the files on your desktop, deciding on a major you’re passionate about, to the mess in your closet. Learning to let go and fully commit yourself to fewer choices will bring great satisfaction.
I want to end this post on a practical note. What should you do? How does one declutter and let go? I figured I’d share some resources that may help you out:
- To begin, you can start by listening to James Altucher’s podcast How Minimalism Brought Me Freedom and Joy. In it, he describes what measures he took to minimize his life and I am not exaggerating when I say you’ll literally be sitting jaw-dropped when you hear the extent to which he went.
- My favorite blog of all-time, WaitButWhy, has a very interesting read How to Pick a Career (That Actually Fits You) which does a great job of explaining how you can analyze who you are deep down to help you better understand the ideas or notions you should let go of and those you should chase wildly.
- Marie Kondo’s book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up has sold 5 million copies worldwide and has a dedicated cult-following which pretty much means it works for a lot of people. I haven’t read it personally, but Tim Ferris has a podcast with Kondo that is a great introduction.
- Netflix has a documentary titled Minimalism which I found to be pretty informative, although the one guy who hugs everyone kinda creeps me out.
- Finally, there are thousands of blogs on minimization you can dig through. Here is one which I enjoy reading from time to time. Start with either Lowering Your Life’s Requirements or The Dangers of Reading.
No matter how you let go and in which areas of your life you decide to do so, it will take work. You’ll need to set up your environment (the place where inputs/information exists) to be optimal to your well-being and you’ll have to learn to let go of things you don’t want to see gone. But in the long run, it will greatly benefit your life, for stagnation is the ultimate killer of self-improvement and development.
My advice is to begin practicing letting go on the microscale. Donate a shirt a day. Throw away useless mementos. Take the walking stick in my video as an example. Normally I would have held on to it, thrown it in my car, and it would have just sat there. But instead I left it for someone else to use and it felt great. In a recent Tim Ferris podcast, Kevin Rose, who has started to throw away or donate something every day this year, iterates the same idea:
“The way you can depart with something is to realize that it has already taught you it’s lesson and that lesson may be that it wasn’t for you…and it should be in a good home where it can be appreciated by someone else.”
I’d like to end this post with a something Jobs said in his 2005 Stanford commencement speech. It’s about death, but regardless, can aptly be applied to the subject at hand:
“Death is very likely the single best invention of life. It’s life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.”
Letting go of things means killing the clutter of our past. Don’t be afraid of the unknown, let it become your best friend. Embrace the darkness. For the unknown is a neatly wrapped present waiting to be opened. Change is the best way to learn the most about yourself. Always remember that. Change is good.
