Should You Live a Macro Life or a Micro Life?

For most of my life, more was more. I wanted more money, more stuff, more friends, more of, well, everything. I viewed life as a bottomless well from which to draw, or as an all-you-can-eat buffet that offered a potentially unlimited amount of goodies to enjoy. I amassed a large collection of things, so much so that I had to move to bigger homes to store everything. At the same time, I amassed a large collection of people to spend time with—here, too, the assumption being that more was better. In financial terms, I sought to increase my material and experiential assets in order to grow my existential portfolio. Life was a matter of volume and quantity: My thinking was that it was a very big world, so why not try to acquire as many things and experiences as possible in one’s limited time.

Then, at around age 50, I began to see things quite differently. Life wasn’t about quantity, but rather quality, my thinking now went, perhaps a function of my having fewer years left. Less could be more, I realized, taking inspiration from Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s 1947 approach to design. Trading upon the modern aesthetic grounded in minimalism would yield greater contentment and happiness, I concluded, reason for me to start shedding most of what I had accumulated over a half-century. In place of continual acquisition, I began to de-acquisition both possessions and relationships in a quest to reduce my life to the bare essentials.

Many others, of course, have gone through a similar experience, which some refer to as voluntary simplicity, i.e., a purposeful reduction of one’s consumer footprint. I see this personal evolution in broader terms, however — specifically as a transition from a macro orientation of life to a micro one. Narrowing the funnel instead of constantly expanding it has for me led to a more concentrated or distilled sense of reality. I focus on the handful of people in my life who truly matter and enjoy owning very few things, feeling that at some point they had come to own me. No matter how much I had, I wanted more, as of course there was always more to be had. And in place of many superficial relationships, I find more pleasure in just a few deep ones.

I have no regrets at all about my macro life, as it was the right approach for me to take in my 20s, 30s, and 40s. The world was never enough, however, to paraphrase the title of the 1999 James Bond movie, and one day I woke up knowing that I had to let go trying to own all of it. As Barry Schwartz made clear in The Paradox of Choice, a “culture of abundance robs us of satisfaction,” i.e., too much ironically often results in too little. On an even grander level, "more-ness" is an unsustainable proposition, whether talking about the planet or an individual.

I’m happy that I have a boatload of memories and stories to tell from my more-is-more days that exemplify the rich pageant that is life. But I’m even happier that, consciously or unconsciously, I eventually switched into micro mode, finding yet more bigness in the small.