> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.hardmode.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Don't You Just Want Less? - URL: https://www.hardmode.com/dont-you-just-want-less/ - Published: 2026-07-18T12:00:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-08-26T01:26:12.000Z - Description: Last year, a company offered to buy mine, and I almost said no — because I couldn’t figure out how to live on less than a million dollars a year. - Author: Brian Spitz - Tags: Hardmode, Economic Changes, Money, Less, Appetite, Capitalism, Freedom, Family, Identity, Perspective, Don't You Just Want Less I still wince at the thought. An overwhelming amount of money to burn — and we didn't own a yacht, and nobody was eating caviar. It was a lovely, comfortable life: the private school, a beautiful home, tennis at the club, the closet of my dreams. *Very comfortable.* But still, just comfortable. I would have imagined a million dollars a year bought you more. Yet the more we spent, the more we needed, and life just got a little steeper every year. I couldn't imagine living on less — let alone *wanting* less. ## Nobody summits carrying more That's the ladder we're all taught to climb: you add as you go. But watch the people who climb actual mountains. The closer they get to the summit of Everest, the more they shed — up there, every ounce is measured, and nobody makes it to the top carrying more. Something about the way we're doing this is backwards. The culture I came up in taught me that more was the reward. > It turns out there is peace, not pain, in needing less. And understand — that money didn't fall in my lap. For twenty years I ran a company that grew until thirty-five families' paychecks came through my hands, a business that gave me a front-row seat to thousands of Americans selling their homes at the hardest moments of their lives. I knew how blessed I was; I watched every day how fast life can turn on you. I was immensely grateful, yet those blessings were a lot of weight to carry, and after two decades I was finally ready to set it down. Not willingly, though — not at first. I knew it was time to sell my company, and when the door opened, I stood there doing math. Selling meant trading an owner's income for a paycheck. A conversation with my husband, James, surfaced the *need* running beneath our whole life: we couldn't live on less than a million dollars a year. > And then came the question that started unwinding everything: **What have we built that costs a million dollars a year to keep?** --- ## As it turns out, I'm addicted to more. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/84/7e/847e8533-a68d-407a-a378-2ca9cb37d6e2/content/images/2026/08/pexels-bohdan-hyrovych-796614725-37718409-1.jpg) If America held a recovery meeting, that would be the confession most of us open with. We are *more* people. It's not a character flaw — it's the water we swim in. Capitalism has been generous to me, and I won't pretend otherwise. But it trained us young, before we could even read: *Get. Upgrade. Never say enough.* We're only trained for the first third of the cycle. We know how to get. We were never taught to enjoy, and we were absolutely never taught to let go. Get, enjoy, release — that's the full breath. America only knows how to inhale. 👟 Roger Bannister was the first man ever to run a mile in under four minutes. His secret? Push through the third quarter — the lap where fatigue sets in. Letting go is the third quarter — the stretch where you struggle. Every year of grade school, our head of middle school, Mr. Lufkin, gave the same animated rendition of the story of Roger Bannister — the first man ever to run a mile in under four minutes. His secret? Push through the third quarter, the lap where fatigue sets in. Where other runners got stuck and lost steam, Bannister ran his third lap in 59 seconds — and broke a record the world had agreed was unbreakable. Once he did, runners everywhere started breaking four minutes too. The impossible just needed a witness. America is stuck on its third lap. We know how to get, and some of us even manage to enjoy. But letting go? That's where the whole culture falls off pace and settles for the storage unit. It's also exactly where the breakthrough lives — somebody just has to go first and report back that you survive it. > So consider this my report. It took that rock-and-a-hard-place moment for me to ask the harder question: *Do I even like this life I'm trading my life for?* Because that's all money is — your time and life force, converted into paper. Here's what the audit turned up: it was a lovely life, and I *liked* nearly all of it. But what did I *love*? Love was scarce. Comfortable is what you get when you buy everything you *should* — but *should* is a very expensive word. --- ## We changed the math. My kids were graduating out of their hundred-thousand-dollar-a-year private school. Cutting that bill was first on the list to reduce our annual burn, but my initial instinct was peak Brian: buy a home at twice the price, in the neighborhood with the best public schools in Houston. Double down. That's how deep *more* runs — even my exit plan was an upgrade. And I'll be honest about how this felt at the start: I was distraught. Cutting our life down to fit a paycheck felt like walking backwards, like losing a game I had spent twenty years winning. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/84/7e/847e8533-a68d-407a-a378-2ca9cb37d6e2/content/images/2026/08/pexels-rdne-8500643-1.jpg) Then the search became an adventure. We started looking at homes in the smaller, quieter towns of the Texas Hill Country — and somewhere out there, the whole thing flipped. Superb public schools, five acres, nestled inside a wildlife preserve. A dream home that cost *less* than the house we left, with a tax bill so low it made me laugh out loud. We left a city we had learned to survive in and traded it for a real place to live — a home and a town that feel like paradise. I never imagined I could downsize and love where we landed *more*. And standing in all that quiet, the realization finally arrived, not as resignation but as revelation: *I actually want this.* The less lifestyle wasn't the sacrifice I'd been dreading. It was the prize. Now I live on a paycheck for the first time in my adult life. I watch what I spend. > I braced for hard; what arrived was freedom. The downshift I nearly refused to make has turned out to be the happiest thing I have ever done. --- ## The closet is where the lesson got physical. I had fallen so hard for the new house that the next decision made itself: it was a smaller home, and the contents of five thousand square feet were not coming with us. Only what I loved could make the trip. So I opened the closet doors and began an archaeological dig through my own addiction. Layer by layer, I pulled out six figures' worth of things I never loved — or loved exactly once. Shirts with tags still on them. Shoes worn once. A collection of Louis Vuitton I could never carry often enough for any single piece to matter. Here's what nobody tells you about letting go: past the dread, it became a game. Every armload out the door made me lighter, and the game became joy — the joy of less. The bags and shoes went to people I love. The rest sold for pennies on the dollar, off to strangers who wanted it more than I ever did. Buried in that dig I found the closest thing this essay has to a thesis: > **Love everything you own — don't own everything you love.** Not one thing came with us that I didn't love. My therapist once told me: it's okay to buy that shirt you really want. It's not the first shirt that gets you — it's the other six in every color. The first one is love. The other six are something else — obsession, boredom, anxiety, a way of telling yourself you're winning. Would you want all the food you'll ever eat in your lifetime delivered at once? A room filled with every meal? It's a question I heard from a spiritual teacher once, and it's never left me. Of course not — you couldn't enjoy it. Most of it would rot before you saw it. You want it to come *as* you're hungry for it. Meal by meal. Craving by craving. Your very body is a reminder: hunger arrives, gets satisfied, passes, and a new one finds you. That's the instruction manual. We were built for appetite, not accumulation. Desire is supposed to move *through* you — not pile up in the guest room. --- ## Now zoom out, because this was never just about me. In 1971, sixty-one percent of Americans lived in middle-class households. Today it's fifty-one — and even the middle that remains takes home a shrinking share of the country's income. The middle is not holding. We are separating into two kinds of people: those who order DoorDash, and those who deliver it. That's not a shot at anyone holding the bag at your door — technology has always retired old jobs while midwifing new ones. It's just the clearest snapshot I know of where the road forks. Prices climb, and paychecks pretend not to notice. Every year, more of us slide just a little. And if this is what downsizing looked like from a seat as cushy as mine, I know how much harder the slide is for the families living it without a cushion at all. What have we done with fifty years of squeeze? We rented more room for our stuff. America now holds over two billion square feet of self-storage — more facilities than McDonald's and Starbucks combined — a second, hidden nation of little rooms we rent month after month to hold what we don't love enough to live with. Nothing you have ever bought has disappeared. It all goes somewhere. My family spent part of this summer among the mountains of the Pacific Northwest and Alaska, and up there the rule is old and simple: the mountain keeps nothing. Whatever you carry up, you carry home. Down here, we built the little rooms instead. > If an archaeologist digs us up in a thousand years, that's the ruin that will confuse him most: a civilization that ran out of money but never ran out of stuff. What is all this more turning us into? And what would it look like if we just started wanting less? --- ## A proposal for the next great American fad Forget the diets and the dopamine cleanses. I want a movement built on one question, asked out loud — at the register, in the group chat, at the dealership: > *Don't you just want less?* Not less as punishment. Not sackcloth and lentils — I like beautiful things, and I'm not here to moralize you out of yours. That's the old religion talking, because desire isn't the enemy. Desire is the whole point. The enemy is *volume* — wanting so much, so fast, so constantly, that you can't taste any of it. The cues are already out there. People building tiny houses and discovering their lives got bigger. People buying dumb phones — paying extra for a second device that does *less* — because our attention finally became too expensive to give away. Our new movement could run on a single filter: *Do I love this?* Not — is it a deal, will it impress, might I need it someday, do people like me have one? No. Do I *love* it. Buy the first shirt. Skip the others. Love everything you own; don't own everything you love. Trade your time and your life force only for what you can love — not what fills space, or what fills time. Life is not a thing to get *through*, decorated with purchases that help you endure it. Find your passion — and put less pressure on yourself to buy your way there. --- I emptied the closet, signed the deal, moved to "the middle of nowhere," and started cashing a paycheck like a grown man learning to walk. And here is the point of all of it — the reason wanting less is worth the third lap: the less I need, the easier my life gets. I no longer wake up calculating how to wring every cent out of the world to feed a life that demanded every dollar. Need less, and the obsession quiets. Need less, and the game stops being so hard. That's my report. > I have less money coming in and less stuff than I've had in years. I want less than I have ever wanted. And I have never once been this full. ***Don't you just want less?*** Yes. Yes is the answer to your question.