This scene has been living rent free in my mind, since I first saw it years and years ago. And yet… yet. It totally paralyzed me for more than a decade.
What I felt when I first watched this, and for the following years, was a form of cognitive dissonance.
There was this contradiction, this gap, between what I felt watching this scene and who I wanted to become as a man.
Looking back, there are three reasons explaining this cognitive dissonance.
First, the character saying “more” is the vilain. That’s the easy one. The character clearly represents something I was not (am not) planning on becoming. So why was I so obsessed with this scene and answer?
Second, this answer is a capitalistic version of “more”. Which, to this day, makes me feel a bit uneasy, looking at the state of our planet and society.
The third one took me fifteen years to solve: more is as much an answer as it is asking questions.
Why more? And more of what?
Until one day, I stumbled upon a Linkedin post from someone I was not even following, titled The Universe Could Not Contain Itself: 8 Signs of Creative Overflow. Please read it in full here, not just the excerpt below.
I never thought that I would someday say that a Linkedin post can change your life, but it has changed mine.
The right words, at the right time.
An excerpt:
4. The Immune System
Ten billion antibody variations – most never used. Your body rehearses attacks that may never come.
→ It doesn’t defend. It imagines.
5. Exoplanets
Lava planets. Frozen gas giants. Diamond crusts. Planets that orbit nothing.
→ The universe doesn’t just make stars. It dreams up worlds it will never visit.
7. Fractals in Nature
Lungs, trees, rivers, lightning – endlessly recursive patterns that never duplicate.
→ Life insists on embedding infinity in the ordinary. Because it can.
We Are the Overflow
The universe doesn’t operate like a machine. It spills, decorates, exaggerates. It doesn’t ask, Is this necessary?
It asks, What else can I do?
And so do you.
You weren’t born to be efficient.
You were born to astonish.
To waste beauty.
To make what no one asked for.
Like the universe that could not contain itself.
Please read the full post and 8 examples here.
This linkedin post and the concept of overflow completely freed me from any cognitive dissonance, guilt, or shame, or even fear, when contemplating the word “more.”
It also helped me to make sense of the word “discipline”, that I have now renamed my “Frame”.
The Frame is only a temporary constraint. Guard rails.
Scaffolding to help you build.
It is a container giving you enough tension, intensity, leverage, to build what you need to build. Waiting for you to overflow it, so it can grow with you.
So, what do I want more of?
I want to build more. I want more wins, and more losses. I want more learning and reading. I want more doing. I want more work, and I want more rest. I want more time with my family, and I want more time building, working. I want more life. I want more of myself. In every direction, no matter how contradictory.
I want things that are actively working against each other. I want them all, at the same time.
This made me realize I needed to become a paradox.