Stimulating visuals, continuous information, yesterday’s news or notifications. Upper-chest breathing, lines of people, seas of bleeps and blurbs. 10+ variants of basically anything, a subscription for everything, 6000 to 10.000 ads per day. Caffeine. Carbs. Sugar. Fats. Caffeine. More caffeine.
This is just a handful of modernity’s bloated bullshit that’s thrown at us on a daily basis, potentially disabling us to live from a base of existential courage. This begs the question: Could it be that less is really more?
Into The Hardangervidda
Some time ago, my love and I wanted to know what it was like to be in a place with “less”: less artificial, less human-made, less external stimuli, for a prolonged amount of time. So, we freed up 10 days of our time and went on a trip to the mighty Hardangervidda: the vast mountain plateau of Southern-central Norway.
Here, in this magical place, there were no cars, no bleeps, and no unnatural colours. The plains were mesmerisingly beautiful precisely because they were so minimal. No matter where we’d look, there was no sign of human activity whatsoever. The plains were raw, untouched, and unbelievably vast.
The Power Of Silence And Slow Walking
For the first couple of days, we chose not speak to each other; picking silence, listening, and intuition over unnecessary chatter. We’d walk at a slow pace, as far as our feet would take us. The vast nothingness of the Hardangervidda had a starving effect on the eyes, on the mind, and the thoughts.
It revealed (in a rather practical manner) that the majority of thoughts were unauthentic, busying themselves with shit that wasn’t present and were on repeat most of the time.
What Happens When the Noise Goes Quiet
Gradually, the vastness of the plains, the stone-cold nights and the deafening silence broke the pattern of a blunt existence, allowing to bring back the joy in the simplest of things: finding water, enjoying company, seeing the stars in the night.
The warmth of a cup of tea became sensational. A look into each other’s eyes became a look into a different, living universe, and a gesture of the other became a confirmation of a shared existence.
When we got back from the plains, and after running out of food, we stumbled upon an old wooden cabin where they served coffee. The place made creaking noises and smelled like an old book that hasn’t been open for 20 years. The fireplace heated up the room, and there was a big, tin can of coffee that was kept warm for hours and hours.
Even though the place seemed pretty boring (nothing seemed to have happened there in the past 50 years); by simply having gone through 10 days of experiencing real stillness made it a place of total ecstasy (and I’ll spare you the details on what the coffee was like).
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Information Overload & The Trap Of More
The essence here is that once we fall for the ideological trap that only more will redeem us, we lose ourselves in lusting for things that are distant, things that are never where we are, leaving us unhappy and unsatisfied.
And in the process of this lusting for more, we go blind to the still wonders that are right in front of our eyes, tucked away in the simple and mundane boring things of the world.
In today’s culture of excess, our precious minds are being injected with thousands of ads a day, and we’re bombarded with information on a scale that no human has ever experienced in history before.
Such an overload of stimuli is, over time, shaping the patterns of your thoughts and the very nature of your subconsciousness. The consequences of such overload, according to a 2024 research study on information overload, are very real: heightened stress, cognitive strain, poorer decision-making, and a slow erosion of mental health.
This makes the ability to de-noise the mind and starve it of information bloat not only a modern-day-superpower, but also a vital element for living in clarity, living authentically, and creating a healthy dose of existential courage.
In that sense, less is really more.
