The Extreme Is the Easy Way Out

On choosing the middle path

I have wasted far too many years of my life in pursuit of optimization. Everything had a number, and that number could, and therefore should, go up.

I tracked my sleep down to every minute, and cold-plunged at 6 am; I batched my emails into two windows a day, and treated anyone who expected an answer outside of those windows like they’d gone and kicked my dog. I had a spreadsheet for my weight, a spreadsheet for my water, and a separate spreadsheet for bio-experiments. My calendar was a fortress of time blocks in every color of the spectrum. I read the books, and I listened to the podcasts - at 1.75x speed, of course.

By every metric I’d chosen to measure, I was arguably “winning.”

And I was also miserable. Miserable and entirely succumbing to ennui.

It took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out what was actually wrong, and when I finally did, I felt like a damn fool. The thing I’d figured out is roughly two thousand years old, was taught by a man sitting under a tree, and has adherents pretty much anywhere you want to look. The answer was this: in my pursuit of virtue, I had conflated it with intensity; I had assumed that if a little discipline was a good thing, total discipline must be better. I had walked all the way to the far end of the road, and planted a flag on my territory and called it home - never noticing that I’d walked straight past the place I actually wanted to live.

We talk about the boring middle. The lazy middle. The compromised middle. But I put it to you that our obsession with picking the extreme and laughing at moderation is little more than cope. It’s our obsession with tribalism, with extremism, with feeling over thinking, with belonging over being. It’s destructive, unhelpful, and soul-destroying.

But it’s also easy. It’s easy to pick the simple answer of going all in on something, anything - of becoming pilled - of picking the red team and accusing the blue team of anything from immorality to inhumanity. It’s easy because all it takes is raising a particular flag.

The middle path is a good deal harder than any of that, and choosing it takes character, more than compromise.

The Cult of the Extreme

We live inside a machine that rewards extremism. I’m not talking about conspiracies; it’s pure physics. An algorithm has to decide what to show three billion people, and the cheapest signal it has is intensity. A post that says “I quit sugar forever and my life transformed, and the sugar industry hates me for it, and they hate you too” travels. A post that says “I eat dessert a couple times a week and I feel pretty fucking good about it” does not. There’s nothing to grab onto - nuance and moderation have no handle.

We’re trained, algorithmically and socially, to buy into the idea that the people who are living the loudest, living the most visibly and noticeably, must be living correctly. The founder, sleeping four hours a night and posting about it, the minimalist who refuses to own more than perhaps 10 distinct objects, the influencer who won’t even glance in the direction of a carb - these must be the pinnacle of human existence. We see their flags planted at the far end, and we think that must be where the answers are - where the serious people go.

The far side is a good deal lonelier than it looks. It’s fragile, and it almost always hides a wound. A man who can’t, who won’t stop working himself half to death, is usually running from something. The extreme minimalist is managing anxiety, not transcending it. Extremism might look like a form of monkish mastery, but it’s more like a cage. I should know - I built one, and decorated it beautifully, and trapped myself inside it while bragging about how free I felt.

But for all the fragility, it’s still easier to understand. It gives you a clear rule and an identity. “I cut out caffeine” is easier to stand by and promote than “I drink a cup of coffee or two, and I moderate up and down depending on the week.”

The Middle is Not the Average

The middle path is not the miquetoast average of two extremes; it’s not lukewarm, it’s not a compromise where you do everything by half measures and feel and accomplish nothing of substance. I find that version of the middle to be both reductive and somewhat cowardly. It’s a way of holding reasonableness and rationality in contempt, the favorite move of anyone who is pilled in any particular direction.

The middle path is the exhausting work of noticing - today, in this hour, in this moment, in this body, in this season of your life and your work - what moderation actually means; knowing the answer may be different next month, and knowing the responsibility for that moderation is yours and yours alone. There is no tribe that can make your decisions for you and make them easier to live with; no ideology that can forgive your sins or blame your failings on someone else’s flaws. The right amount of anything is a moving target that you have to find for yourself, again and again.

The Buddha never talked about the middle path as the safest choice between two parties. He’d tried various extremes - he’d been a prince drowning in pleasure, and an ascetic starving himself down to a skeleton, so thin (the story goes) that he could touch his spine through his stomach. Where he landed was an entirely different axis - a way of holding experience that neither indulgence nor punishment could reach.

It’s not stillness. It’s balance, in a sense, closer to riding a bicycle: you can only stay upright by staying in motion, continuously and minutely correcting your trajectory and your center of gravity - and the moment you come to a stop, you must fall.

Why the Middle is Harder

The extreme is the easy option.

I’m not being glib; running a single marathon is easier, in a deep sense, than running three miles four times a week for forty years, rain, sleet, or snow. The marathon has a beginning, a middle, and an end, with a medal you get to hang around your neck. It has a story you can tell, and it comes with built-in bragging rights. Forty years of steadily grinding down the same path has none of that - the only finish line is your body giving out or the grave, whichever comes first. You don’t get the audience or the narrative arc. You get the unglamorous accumulation of a life lived well with intention.

The extreme is a way of avoiding a harder discipline. A crash diet is easier than a well-maintained relationship with food. A vow of silence is easier than learning to speak and choosing your words carefully. In a sense, if you burn everything down and move to a cabin in isolation, you’ve taken the lazy way out. You’ve rage-quit the daily negotiation and navigation of a normal life through a single dramatic gesture. The middle path would ask you to stay, and to keep on negotiating; to tolerate the ambiguity; to make a thousand difficult choices, a thousand times, instead of one choice at max volume. It’s why so few people do it; it’s undramatic. You become someone whose life works, rather than a squeaky wheel who gets the grease, the attention, and the followers.

The extreme path is to grind until you break, or quit and follow your bliss. The middle path is to work hard in some seasons, rest in others, and most importantly, know which season you’re in. Some weeks, you sprint. Some, you protect your evenings as sacred.

The extreme path is to eliminate this food group, or that; follow the protocol, never deviate. The middle path is to eat mostly well, as much and as often as you can, enjoy a slice of cake when there’s a slice going around, and stop treating each meal as a referendum on your personal moral character. Our relationship to food isn’t actually broken because we don’t have enough rules to govern it; it’s broken because we’ve altogether too many rules, far too many, applied far too rigidly, fraying and snapping under their own tension.

The extreme says to pick an opinion, pick a tribe, adopt the whole package, and defend it to the death, fighting tooth and nail all the way down to show your allegiance and your dedication to the cause. The middle, the hard middle, says: hold your convictions strongly, but your certainty loosely, and be willing to believe that the other side has probably got a few things right, even if you disagree with most of what they’ve built up around it. When everyone else treats every question as a battleground and every problem as total war, the willingness and willpower to say “it’s complicated,” “I’m still learning,” and even “I don’t give a shit” is nearly heretical. It may cost you membership in various clubs, but it’s a price worth paying.

The extreme says you must become extraordinary and prove extraordinary value, or you have no value at all. The middle says: become as good as possibly can be at the things that matter to you, but be selective about what those things are, and let that be enough. Reach for what you want, but reach in one direction, and know which direction that is.

The reason the middle path looks, from the outside, unsatisfying is that you never actually get to arrive. There’s no moment where you’ve achieved perfect moderation, and you can stop. The extreme offers arrival - I AM the person who does the cold plunge, I AM the person who fasts, full stop, identity locked, I AM a vegan, I AM keto, I AM AI Pilled, etc. The middle offers only the ride // the journey, always correcting, always re-reading the conditions, always slightly unsure if you’ve got the balance quite right.

That uncertainty keeps you awake and alive, in contact with your actual life instead of a rulebook you (or someone else) wrote for your life two years ago, when you were an entirely different person with different needs. The rigid person is, in many ways, asleep at the wheel. They decided once, and they stopped paying attention. The person on the middle path can never fully relax or fully check out. They have to stay present in a way that the extremist, for all their intensity, almost never has to be.

I need some structure in my life. I need a few spreadsheets, databases, and checklists. I have a business to run, a kid to raise, a life to keep in some semblance of order. But I have given up on the project of optimizing myself into a machine, of picking various extremes and assigning my identity to them. I have the texture of an actual life, now - I sleep well most nights, and quite badly some nights, and I no longer treat the rough, tossing and turning midnight hours as some sort of moral failure. I work hard when I need to, and I stop when the time comes. I have strong opinions, but I readily admit when I’m wrong. I have been known to eat cake, and preferably Black Forrest, at that.

I have no delusion that my lifestyle will create a movement, or generate a million followers, or go viral. The middle path trendeth not. It can’t be easily reduced to a rule you can tattoo on your forehead or run up a flagpole; it can only be practiced by folks with the patience to tolerate not having all the answers.

When you feel the pull toward the far side - to the cleanse, to the vow, to the total system, to the clean break, to the loudest possible identity - pause, breathe, and ask whether you’re striving for mastery or just toward something easier to explain and maintain. Is the extreme the answer, or the exit?

I choose the middle. My preference is to ride the bicycle - and to stay awake.