My friend Matt just finished hiking the Pacific Crest Trail—2,653 miles from Mexico to Canada. I asked him if he had any profound insights from the six-month journey, and he dropped this truth bomb on me: “On the trail, living is hard—but life is easy. In normal life, living is easy—but life is hard.” The things that make our lives comfortable also make them complex. Busier. More stressful. Like a frog being boiled, we slowly accumulate more things, more obligations, and more relationships that need to be maintained (and paid for). 🐸Before we know it… we’re cooked—trapped in a prison of our own design. We’ve made living easy, but life hard. Here’s the inescapable truth: Whether you’re a billionaire or broke, everything you own owns a piece of you. When you do something extreme—like hiking the PCT—it forces a return to simplicity. You realize that less really is more and creature comforts come at a cost. What I’m talking about here is minimalism—a widely misunderstood concept. Minimalism isn’t about sacrifice and self-denial—it’s about asking of everything in your life: Does this bring me joy? Does it make living easier, but life harder? It’s addition by subtraction: Removing things from your life that don’t bring joy allows you to feast on things that do. If you feel like you’re living on a hamster wheel—maybe the answer isn’t to run faster… Maybe it’s time to step off.