When Life Shifts Simplify
When life changes unexpectedly, adding more rarely helps
Three years ago, I went through a season where several things changed at once. Nothing catastrophic, but enough at the same time: a move, a shift in the work I was doing, a relationship that ended quietly and left more space than I had expected. Each of those changes on its own would have been manageable. Together they created a kind of ambient uncertainty that made it hard to know which way to face. My first instinct, which I followed for longer than I should have, was to compensate by adding. More structure, more goals, more commitment to the future version of the life I was building toward. I thought that filling the space would steady it. What it actually did was make the instability harder to see clearly.
What eventually helped was the opposite of what I had been doing. I started removing things. Not dramatically, not all at once, but one at a time, asking each week what could come off the list with no actual cost. The projects that had accumulated more out of habit than intention. The obligations I had agreed to in a different season of life that no longer quite fit the current one. The routines built around circumstances that had changed. As each of these came off, something settled. Not because the external situation had resolved, but because the internal one had more room to move. Simplicity was not a retreat from ambition. It was the condition that made clear thinking possible again.
This experience sits at the heart of what I wrote about in 86,400 Seconds a Day. The book begins with the observation that everyone receives 86,400 seconds daily. What separates one life from another is not the number of seconds, but the quality of attention given to how they are spent. When life shifts, the temptation is to protect the structure by holding onto everything already in it. But a structure built for a previous season rarely fits the new one without changes. Simplifying is not giving up on what you were building. It is clearing the space to see what still belongs.
There is a particular exhaustion that comes from maintaining a life that no longer quite matches your circumstances. It is not the exhaustion of hard work, which feels purposeful even when it is heavy. Friction causes this exhaustion by forcing you to spend energy on the discrepancy between how things are set up and how they truly should be. Most people don’t name it, as doing so implies a need for change, which is difficult to confront.
When life shifts, the first useful question is not what to add but what to release. The habit that made sense when the week looked different. The goal set during a season of stability now sits awkwardly against a season of transition. The commitment made to a future self that the current self is no longer sure it recognizes. These are not failures. They are simply things that belong to a previous chapter, and carrying them into the current one at full weight makes the chapter harder to write than it needs to be.
86,400 Seconds a Day suggests focusing on seconds that build your desired life, often by letting go of those spent on a past one. That release is an act of clarity, not defeat. It is the decision to be honest about what the current season requires rather than loyal to what the previous one demanded.
I think about that period three years ago with a kind of gratitude I could not have felt. Not for the difficulty of it, but for what the difficulty eventually made clear. The life that emerged from that season of simplifying was closer to what I had actually wanted than the one I had been frantically trying to maintain. The removal made room. The room made it possible to see. And what I saw, once I stopped filling the space with compensation, was a direction I had been moving toward all along without the clarity to name it.
This week, if your life has shifted recently, large or small, take ten minutes and look at what you currently carry that belongs to the previous version of your circumstances. Not everything. Just one thing that no longer quite fits. Set it down deliberately, not because you are giving up on what it represented, but because the current season has different requirements, and those requirements deserve your clearest attention. Simplicity is not the absence of ambition. It is the condition under which ambition becomes possible again.
Wishing you a steady and intentional week ahead.
See you next week,
Pierre P.