Human nature and the idea of 'enough'

 If you ask people to improve a piece of writing, almost everyone will add to it.

When psychologists began to study why that’s so, they found that the impulse to add is not conscious, which suggests that it’s built in. People rarely think about subtracting.

I spent my working life as a newspaper editor, leaning on the delete key.

What’s better than an article that gives you a clear and accurate idea that takes 5 minutes to read? One that gives the same clear and accurate idea in 3 minutes. If your time is valuable, the shorter version is better.

If someone conveys a clear and accurate idea to you in 300 words, that’s enough. Adding another 200 words of blather doesn’t help.

Michelle Nijhuis has an article in The New York Review of Books that asks “Must We Grow?” The article looks at two books that question whether human communities must grow until we overwhelm the environment.

The article gives a good sense of that impulse to add, to increase and to grow. I am fascinated by cases where our instinct tells us one thing and our reason tells us something else. The moral dilemma, in a nutshell.

One of the most interesting notes in the article was about the research of Stephanie Preston, a psychologist at the University of Michigan. Her studies “show that both kangaroo rats and humans respond to stress by hoarding.”

• Source: Michelle Nijhuis, “Must We Grow?”; The New York Review of Books, June 9, 2022, Vol. LXIX, No. 10, pp. 12-14. She reviews two books: Leidy Klotz’s Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less and J.B. MacKinnon’s The Day the World Stops Shopping.