I used to think comfort came from having more options. Now I think it comes from needing fewer

I used to think comfort came from having more options. Now I think it comes from needing fewer.

That's a different statement than it sounds. I'm not saying choice is bad, or that a wide menu is a problem. I'm saying that for a long time I confused having options with being free, and they aren't the same thing.

In my twenties, the goal felt obvious. Keep doors open. Don't get tied down. Get on the plane if the chance comes. Try the new restaurant instead of the old one. Read everything. Try everything. Decide later.

It felt expansive at the time. Looking back, it mostly felt loud.

When choice starts to feel like weight

Somewhere in my mid-thirties I noticed the menu had become exhausting. Not the restaurant menu, the bigger one. There were more films to watch than I could ever watch, more books than I could ever read, more podcasts, more travel destinations, more side projects, more frameworks for living. Every time I picked one thing, the others stayed in the background, slightly tugging.

I don't think I'm alone in this. A lot of people in my generation grew up being told the world was wide open, and we mistook that for instructions to keep all of it open at the same time. Which is a strange thing to try to do, when you actually look at it.

You can't live in five cities. You can't have ten close friends. You can't read every important book. The choice doesn't really exist. What exists is the act of pretending it does, and the small ache of all the other roads not taken sitting in the back of your mind.

The morning coffee

These days my mornings look almost identical. Wake up early. Sit for twenty minutes. Same kopi from the same uncle at the same coffee shop in Singapore. Same loop along the canal. Same desk.

I used to think this was the kind of life I'd grow out of. A short phase before something more interesting. Now I see it as the thing itself.

The interesting part isn't that the routine is repetitive. It's that I don't feel the pull to vary it. The desire for variety, which used to feel like a clear signal of being alive, doesn't show up the way it used to. I'm not bored by sameness. I'm steadied by it.

I wear the same five or six shirts on rotation. Same shorts. Same shoes until they fall apart. My wife jokes about it. There was a year where I owned a lot more clothes than I needed, and I'd stand in front of the cupboard for too long every morning. Now getting dressed isn't a decision. It's just a thing that happens before the day starts.

The fewer small decisions you make in a day, the less worn out you are by the time the bigger ones arrive.

What our daughter doesn't think about

She's not quite one yet. Watching her, I've noticed she doesn't think about what she's missing. She picks up a wooden spoon and is completely inside it. Then she puts it down. Then she's inside a cardboard box. Nothing is on her mind except the thing in front of her.

I'm not romanticising babies. They have plenty of their own difficulties. But the absence of optionality in her world is striking. She isn't choosing the spoon over twenty other spoons. She's just with the spoon.

Adults reintroduce that complication everywhere. We do it with food, with weekends, with work, with the future. Most of the things we're choosing between aren't even real choices. They're images of choices, hanging in our heads, asking to be sorted.

When the wanting shrinks on its own

This is the part I didn't expect. I thought wanting fewer things would feel like a sacrifice. Some kind of effortful pruning.

It hasn't been like that. Mostly the wanting has just thinned out by itself. I stopped being interested in new clothes. I stopped being interested in being somewhere else. I stopped being interested in a lot of the things that used to seem worth chasing.

It's not that I became disciplined. I became less hungry.

I think this happens to a lot of people quietly, somewhere in their thirties or forties, and they don't always notice it because they expect contentment to arrive as a feeling of fullness. Sometimes it arrives as a feeling of having stopped reaching.

What a narrowed life actually feels like

People assume a narrower life is duller. From the outside, mine probably looks like a person who doesn't do much. A few places. A handful of close people. A small set of interests I keep returning to. Same work with my brothers, same family, same routines, regular trips to Saigon to see my wife's family.

From the inside it doesn't feel small. It feels specific. There's a difference between those two things.

A life full of borrowed things feels narrow because none of it is really yours. A life that has narrowed because you finally noticed what you actually care about feels wide in a different way. There's more time inside the day. More attention for the people in front of you. Fewer things tugging at the edges of your mind.

What I'd say to my younger self

He wouldn't listen, but if he would, I'd tell him something like this. You don't need to keep collecting options. Most of the doors you're afraid to close were never doors you were going to walk through anyway.

He'd nod, then go book a flight somewhere, because that's what twenty-six-year-olds do, and that's fine.

The thing is, you can't get to needing fewer options by trying to need fewer options. It happens on its own, after enough years of finding out what you actually return to. The narrowing isn't a decision. It's a slow noticing.

Some mornings I drink my kopi and think about how much trouble younger me went to, trying to keep every door open. And I'm glad he did. He had to do all of that so I could be sitting here, not doing it anymore.