Creating or procuring new things or ideas devalues those that have come before it. Applying "start from scratch" thinking solves today's problems, but creates problems of its own. It does not scale well. Most of life is [[Zero-Sum]]-ish. When you buy a new thing, you get the utility of that thing... but you also buy into it's maintenance & storage [[Overhead]] **and** give yourself less reason to utilize the things you already have, making them less valuable. ![[Pasted image 20250714223827.png]] It's not just about [[Minimal Stuff]] either! This *exact same phenomenon* happens when you (or your company) employs many separate (i.e. not [[Synergize|synergistic]]) solutions to the same general problem. The first one helps a ton - the 5th one basically only hurts the other 4. It's one interpretation of why [[Minimal Activities]] is to be preferred. This [[Principles Index|principle]] is nearly universal in regular life. The only thing that changes is the timeframe / number of useful entries before the [[Law of Diminishing Returns]] makes additional inputs actually *negatively* useful. This is also why I so firmly believe you should [[Build On Yourself|Don't start from scratch]]. > [!example] > Consumer tech: > - you have a phone, sweet! > - You have a phone and an MacBook, double sweet! > - You have all that + an iPad, okay cool, but now you start to use the iPad for stuff you used to use the phone and computer for. > - You have all that, plus an iPad Mini - okay now you grab your phone even less often, you grab your iPad less often, you have 4 things to keep charged, and you're no better off. > - You have all that, plus an iMac - your MacBook becomes almost totally superfluous. You have an iPad you never use. You have not gained anything other than more things that could potentially have problems you have to deal with. **The default mode of problem solving is to create some new initiative or invest in some new thing, and this is a flawed long-term strategy**. You can mitigate this by regularly pruning, removing what's old to make way for what's new, or better yet: repurposing what's old to suit what's new. A good approach that scales is following the [[One In, One Out]] method. [[Use It or Lose It]]. **** # More ## Source - [[Myself]]