Growth by Subtraction
Daily Chase #269
Adding hard things is easier than removing comfortable ones.
We tend to think of growth as accumulation — more discipline, more reps, more intensity, more structure. And there’s real value in that. But there’s a subtler kind of work that most of us spend our whole lives avoiding.
Subtraction.
Removing the coping mechanism. Sitting with the emotion instead of routing around it. Letting yourself be uncomfortable without reaching for the thing that makes it okay.
It’s harder than any workout. There’s no metric for it. No one’s watching you do the reps. And the gains are rarely visible.
But the fastest way to find out what’s actually running your life isn’t to add something new. It’s to take something away — and notice what surfaces when it’s gone.
Athena Perez fasted for 40 days to find out. Not as a physical challenge, but as an experiment in facing what she’d been using food to avoid for most of her life. Around day 17, the noise finally went quiet. What remained was just her and the mechanisms she’d built to avoid feeling.
In the quiet that follows subtraction, as she told us, you find out what you were actually thinking about. What you’ve been managing. What you’ve been using your routines to avoid.
That’s the information you need. Not more structure layered on top of unexamined patterns.
Growth by subtraction isn’t a cleanse or a detox. It’s a diagnostic. It asks: What am I reaching for, and why? And then, instead of reaching, just sitting there. Seeing what’s underneath.
That’s uncomfortable in a way that adding doesn’t prepare you for.
Which is exactly why it works.
More on this idea from Athena in this week’s episode →
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This is good. The hustle culture teaches us to do more. So does consumerism. More stuff, more apps, more metrics. But, as you point out, peace is found by doing less. Stripping away the noise, distractions and things we chase to avoid confronting the true barriers to calm.