Not Everything Deserves to Live
First, a boundary: every person deserves dignity and life. This essay is not a license to harm beings. It’s a lens for curation—about letting certain things die: ideas, habits, projects, purchases, commitments, stories we tell ourselves. We prune the garden so the fruit can grow.
We live in an economy of attention with a brutal math problem: 24 hours. You can’t keep everything. If you try, the weeds win. “Not everything deserves to live” is a decision rule—an ethic of selection that favors what is vital over what is merely persistent.
1) The ecology of your attention
Imagine your day as a habitat. Every notification is an invasive species; every open tab, a hungry herbivore; every half‑finished project, a nocturnal scavenger that steals nutrients while you sleep. If you don’t regulate this ecosystem, your keystone species—focus, relationships, health—go extinct.
Principle: What cannot nourish you doesn’t deserve residency in your habitat.
2) The contact sheet test
Photographers learn by editing. Ninety‑nine frames get culled so one frame can breathe. The value is not the accumulation of shots but the concentration of the shot. Life works the same way: most of what we capture is scaffolding for the few things worth keeping. You don’t owe your past attempts immortality.
Ask: If this idea were a photo, would I print it big and hang it on the wall? If not, delete.
3) A rule of creative selection
Not every seed deserves water. Water is time, and time is life. When the seed is weak, watering becomes a slow leak of days. Let the strong seeds show themselves by how much energy they return.
A simple algorithm:
- Energy test: Does it net‑energize me after I do it?
- Progress test: Did it move something important forward this week?
- Opportunity test: What am I not doing because I’m feeding this?
- Resurrection test: If it vanished tomorrow, would I fight to bring it back?
- Day‑one test: Knowing what I know now, would I start this today?
If it fails three tests, it doesn’t deserve to live.
4) What to let die (mercifully, and without drama)
- Zombie projects that refuse to finish and refuse to die. They drain morale and block the door for better ideas.
- Fantasy goals inherited from an earlier version of you (or from other people’s expectations). If it’s built on borrowed desire, release it.
- Status metrics that convert living craft into a scoreboard—likes, leaderboards, empty credentials.
- Notifications engineered to outsource your priorities to someone else’s roadmap.
- Grudges and stale guilt. They never pay rent; they only demand it.
- Perfectionism. Gold‑plating the trivial guarantees the essential will starve.
Letting these die is not failure; it is husbandry—active care for a finite life.
5) What to keep fiercely alive
- People you love. Calendar them first; defend those blocks like a territory.
- Curiosity. It is the oxygen of original work.
- Health. Sleep, movement, sunlight, real food. This is the power grid for everything else.
- Deep work that compounds. The thing that makes tomorrow easier than today.
- Play. The shortest path to unexpected ideas.
6) Tools for humane pruning
- One‑in, one‑out. For commitments, apps, books, gear. If something new enters, something old exits.
- Seasonal projects. Define seasons (8–12 weeks). At the end: harvest, archive, or compost. No endless winters.
- Weekly cull. Thirty minutes, same time each week: delete, unsubscribe, say no, close loops.
- Hard caps. Max 3 active projects. Max 2 social platforms. Max 1 “urgent” at a time.
- The “shelf” folder. Not a graveyard—a nursery. Move maybes there and review monthly. If something sleeps there for 90 days, archive permanently.
7) The ethics of “deserve”
“Deserve” can sound cruel. Use it on things, not on people. Ideas aren’t children; they’re tools. Projects aren’t persons; they’re bets. To withdraw support from a bad bet is moral clarity, not callousness. Compassion includes compassion for your future self, the one who inherits your calendar.
8) Courage without theatrics
Ending something doesn’t require a manifesto. Just end it. Email two lines: “Thank you. I’m stepping back to focus on fewer priorities.” Delete the app. Box the gear. Cancel the auto‑renew. The ritual is simple: remove, breathe, proceed.
The fear is real: what if I cut the wrong thing? Good. Fear sharpens attention. Start with reversible cuts. Most aren’t permanent; what truly matters will demand resurrection, and when it does, you’ll feel the pull.
9) A practice for makers
- Morning: Decide your one necessary task before looking at a screen.
- During work: Put the non‑essential on a capture list, not on your calendar.
- Afternoon: Edit (don’t just add) at least one thing—line of code, paragraph, slide, photo.
- Evening: Close the day with a sentence: What deserved my life today? Tomorrow, do more of that.
10) On beauty and waste
Nature is extravagant and ruthless. Trees drop leaves. Bodies shed cells. Healthy systems waste what they cannot use. Waste is not sin; it’s information: a map toward a leaner, truer shape.
Your life is carving. The sculpture appears as you remove what the form is not.
11) A short exercise
Open your “everything” drawer—physical or digital.
- List ten items inside: apps, emails, gear, documents, obligations.
- Star two that, if nurtured, would meaningfully improve your next 90 days.
- Cross out five that are noise. Delete or cancel them now.
- For the remaining three, put them on the shelf folder with a review date.
You just created space. Feel the air move.
12) Closing
We confuse endurance with worth. But survival alone is not a credential. The things deserving of life are those that give life back—clarity, strength, warmth, momentum. Everything else is a shadow that asks to be carried.
Let it go. Not out of cruelty, but out of love for what remains. Prune ruthlessly, care deeply, and protect the few living things that make your short time rich. The world doesn’t need more of everything; it needs the best of you, concentrated.
If you’d like, I can tailor this to a specific domain—creative work, fitness, relationships, or digital minimalism—and turn the principles into a checklist or a short manifesto poster.