The economy of always more: when everything you consume consumes you.
Never in human history have we had so much access to everything. And never have we felt so overstimulated, so distracted, so lonely, and so tired.
We are living in an era of excess.
- Excess of information.
- Excess of technology.
- Excess of choice.
- Excess of connection.
- Excess of identity.
And yet, nothing ever seems to be enough.
This is a systemic failure, not a personal one. Remember that. We consume faster than we can process information, and we live faster than we can actually feel things.
What a time to be alive
Let's be honest: by almost every measurable metric, this is the best time to be alive.
You can learn anything for free, talk to anyone across the planet in real-time, build a business from your bedroom, launch your dream app without knowing how to code, fly anywhere in hours, and get almost anything delivered before dinner. You can learn to code with AI, produce music without a studio, publish a book without a publisher, and fall in love with someone you've never physically met.
The tools are miraculous. The access is unprecedented. The potential is demonstrably infinite.
And most of us are drowning in it.
No one taught us how to handle this. We were handed the most powerful era in human history with no user manual and no cultural framework for knowing when to stop.
Too much, without the know-how to manage it, creates its own form of poverty.
It's not about the money
We have more than any generation before us. More products, more people, more content, more possible paths, more versions of who we could become—and the dominant emotional climate of our era is exhaustion.
You scroll too much, you date too much, you compare too much, you communicate too much, you over-optimize your entire existence. You consume content you will never remember, you meet people you will never message again, you chase versions of yourself that you will abandon at the next novelty, and you accumulate experiences faster than you can digest them.
We treat life like an all-you-can-eat buffet of options, identities, relationships, aesthetics, ambitions—and we wonder why we feel bloated and dissatisfied.
We spent two centuries solving material scarcity: food, electricity, transportation. The shift from material scarcity to cognitive overload is one of the greatest psychological upheavals in human history.
The overconsumption of attention
This is where it all begins. Our attention is the most PRECIOUS thing we own—I will never get tired of repeating this. And notice how easily we give it away for free to algorithms that don't even know our name. How easily we let ourselves be manipulated.
We scroll when we are tired, we open apps without intention (just out of reflex), and we absorb violent, sexual, bizarre, and stupid content that we never asked for. It settles into our nervous system like radioactive background noise. You didn't choose it, it chose you.
We talk about information overload like a minor inconvenience. It is actually a slow erosion. Every piece of content consumed without intention costs you something—a thought you didn't have, a moment you didn't live, a decision you didn't make.
When inputs exceed processing capacity, the mind pauses.
Before mass media—social networks and AI included—your brain evolved to handle the social lives of about 150 people (a village). This is the concept of Dunbar's number, a well-known hypothesis suggesting a cognitive limit to stable social relationships, from hunter-gatherer tribes to historical military units.1 Today, your nervous system processes millions of faces, tragedies, opinions, and lives every single day. With no evolutionary precedent. With no manual.
The overconsumption of access
Here is something typically 2026: we don't even really buy things anymore. We subscribe to the possibility of using them. Right?
2TB of iCloud, ChatGPT, Claude Code, Midjourney, etc. You pay every month for 12 different versions of a better life, and you actively use, say, 3?
And the problem goes deeper than entertainment. We now subscribe to productivity, to creativity, to intelligence itself. You pay for an AI assistant supposed to help you write, think, plan, organize—and then you spend three hours scrolling instead of using it. Or chatting with it about your crush. Seriously?
You pay for a fitness app that sends you notifications you swipe away. You pay for a language app that guilt-trips you with cartoonish illustrations while you learn absolutely nothing.
The subscription model sells access—permanent, frictionless, guilt-free access. And access feels like progress, even when nothing is actually happening.
Signing up feels like taking action. Actually taking action becomes optional.
We have built entire lives around infrastructures we never use. We keep paying because canceling feels like abandoning the version of ourselves that subscribed in the first place.
The overconsumption of people and relationships
Here is the part nobody wants to hear: we overconsume people, and not just romantically.
We chain together what we think are unlimited first dates, we accumulate superficial friendships, and we maintain professional relationships that only exist on social networks. We stay half-in, half-out of everything, calling it flexibility when in reality it is the fear of choosing.
Ghosting is overflow. When you have too many options, no one feels irreplaceable—and when no one feels irreplaceable, no one is ever fully chosen.
When everything is optional, nothing is sacred anymore.
Long-term, this rewires how we attach to others. Please note that word. Rewires. You stop building with people and start flipping through them. I did it too. I kept people at a distance and called it protecting my peace. Loyalty starts to feel inefficient.
The muscle responsible for consistency—pushing through boredom, conflicts, the uncomfortable rough patches of any relationship—atrophies. And one day, you realize you have hundreds of contacts and no one to call, because you never let anyone stay long enough to really matter.
The overconsumption of self-image
This one is the most discreet—the one that drains you without leaving a trace.
Every purchase is a costume—a version of yourself that expires at the next trend cycle. You change aesthetics more often than you change your mind on what actually matters.
There is something truly powerful about being recognized for the same type of outfits, because it means you have stopped playing a role and started simply existing. But that kind of stability is terrifying in a culture that presents endless reinvention as self-care.
We overconsume identities, and every new version widens the gap between us and who we truly are.
The emotional cost
Overconsumption makes life louder.
You are exhausted by the noise—by people you didn't need, content you didn't choose, and things that, in all honesty, do not matter to you at all. It is the burnout that nobody diagnoses, because it comes from an excess of absorption, from a life spent in a constant stream of inputs without ever producing a clear internal signal.
Numbness is not the absence of feeling. Numbness is the presence of everything, all at once.
In the 1940s, Adorno and Horkheimer warned that culture would stop being something we live and become something we consume.2 They were talking about radio and cinema. They could never have imagined a world where creativity, productivity, intelligence, and even identity, would be mass-produced and resold as monthly subscriptions. They called it the culture industry. Eighty years later, we live inside it.
Digital minimalism
Forget the fake stunt of "I deleted social media" that rarely lasts more than a week. I've been there too.
True minimalism is a conscious, unforced choice. It's deleting the app that pushes you to impulse-buy at 2 AM, unfollowing the accounts that make you feel perpetually behind on everything, and acknowledging that the video you just watched for an hour or two wasn't entertainment—it was anesthesia.
You don't need a digital detox. You need a strict digital diet, which doesn't eliminate everything, but simply forces you to choose what you let in.
Minimalism means stopping the involuntary consumption of always more.
Living selectively
The antidote to overconsumption is selection.
It means fewer but deeper dates, fewer clothes but of better quality, fewer absorbed opinions and more genuinely constructed thoughts, fewer tabs open in your browser and in your life.
Living this way is not inherently "cool"—nobody makes a post about it, there is no "haul" video for "I bought nothing this week", and there is certainly no trend for "I spent a whole month with just one idea".
But people who live this way tend to share one thing: they are not anxious, they are not scattered, and they know what they want because they gave themselves enough silence to hear it. Which is a luxury, nowadays.
From never enough to enough
Overconsumption is the sign that we have lost the ability to stop.
We keep adding apps, people, goals, identities, feeds—hoping that the next addition will finally be the one that makes us feel like it is enough. "Enough" is recognized by subtraction.
The most radical act of 2026 might genuinely be wanting less.
For a long time, I absorbed everything. Content, people, identities, subscriptions, ambitions, noise—everything, all at once. I called it living a full life, "trying everything". It was sheer volume. The day I deliberately started subtracting things, uncomfortably, one by one—I expected to feel empty. What I found was silence. And in that silence, for the first time in years, I could finally hear myself.
No more noise, no more jealousy, no more pretense. You can get there too. Not by revolutionizing your life overnight, but by starting with five minutes of honesty.
Where to start
You don't need a 30-day challenge. Here are a few starting points—feel free to pick your own method:
- The pre-sleep screen check. Tonight, before putting your phone down, look at your screen time. Just look. Most people are genuinely shocked. That 8-hour average didn't come from intention. It came from autopilot.
- Delete one app, right now. Not the one you love, the one you open out of boredom and close feeling worse. You know the one. You probably opened it twice while reading this text. For me, it was Instagram. It's been quite a while since I got rid of it.
- Wear the same two outfits for a week. Pick outfits you love and feel yourself in, and repeat them. Notice how nobody cares, and how much mental space you get back by stopping playing a role for the mirror. If you see me in person, you'll see me wear the same things. I stay clean, sharp, and gorgeous (yes, yes). But I value my time now.
- Go somewhere without documenting it. No story, no photo, no check-in. Go and let it exist only in your memory. I started doing this and realized half my experiences were happening for the camera, not for me.
- Wait 72 hours before buying anything seen in a short video. If you still want it, go for it. But most of the time, you won't even remember what it was. That is how real the need was. I saved more money with this habit than with all the budgeting apps I subscribed to without ever opening.
- Audit your subscriptions. Open your bank statement, count every recurring charge, and ask one single question per line: did I use this in the last 30 days? Not "could I use it", but: did I use it? Cancel everything that only survived on good intentions. You will be surprised to see how much money was going toward a person you never became.
- Write down the five people you gave the most energy to this month. Not the five you love the most, the five who actually got your time. If those two lists don't match, there is your answer.
- Sit somewhere for ten minutes with absolutely nothing. No phone, no book, no music. Just you and the thoughts that show up. It will feel unbearable at first. That discomfort is the exact measure of how overstimulated you are.
Notice how free you will feel. How much time you will have for what really matters. None of this is revolutionary. That is precisely the point. Change doesn't start with a grand gesture. It starts with that uncomfortable little moment where you choose less and realize you are missing nothing.
Read Next