The art of the controlled burn
Strategic destruction as a form of self-care
Hello friends! As we head toward the end of the year, I’ve been thinking a lot about what we carry with us and what we need to leave behind. This essay is about the art of subtraction… why we often have to destroy parts of our lives to save the rest. If you’re feeling heavy or cluttered, I hope this helps you clear the deadwood. x
There’s a misconception about personal growth that most of us buy into without a second thought. We tend to view “becoming” (that lifelong process of evolving into who we’re meant to be) as a construction project. We treat our lives like a house we’re constantly adding to. A new wing for a career, a second story for a relationship, a fresh coat of paint for a new hobby. We operate under the assumption that improvement is strictly additive, and if we want to be better, we think we need to acquire more: more skills, more friends, more accolades, more self. But if you look at how actual living systems function, this architectural metaphor quickly falls apart.
Nature doesn’t build indefinitely; it cycles. And often, the most vital part of that cycle isn’t the growth, but the destruction.
If you spend any time studying ecology, you’ll eventually run into the concept of the “controlled burn.” It’s a counterintuitive practice where rangers or land managers intentionally set small, manageable fires to clear out the underbrush of a forest. It looks destructive on the surface, but it’s actually an act of radical preservation. If a forest is protected from fire for too long, it gets choked. Deadwood piles up, invasive species block the sunlight, and the forest floor becomes a tangled mess of dry tinder. The ecosystem stops breathing, making it fragile… like it’s sitting on a powder keg that’s waiting for a single lightning strike to turn the whole thing into a full-blown catastrophe.
The controlled burn prevents the mega-fire. It clears the floor so that new life, which has been overshadowed and starved of resources, can finally break through the soil.
I’ve been thinking about this lately because it feels like the most accurate framework for understanding how we actually change. We aren’t buildings or houses; we’re ecosystems. And to evolve, we can’t just keep piling new identities on top of old ones, we have to be willing to incinerate the deadwood of our past selves to make room for who we intend to be. Real growth is usually a process of subtractions—a series of controlled burns where we deliberately let go of the parts of us that have died so the rest of us can live.
The ancient logic of fire.
We treat this idea of “burning it down” like it’s a modern crisis, but the ancients saw it as the fundamental nature of reality. The Greek philosopher Heraclitus argued that the world is “ever-living fire,” constantly kindling and quenching itself. To him, fire wasn’t just an element, it was the agent of change. Just like you can’t step into the same river twice, you can’t wake up as the same person twice.
We see this echoed in our myths, specifically the Phoenix. It’s a cliché now, but if you think about the actual mechanism of that story, the bird doesn’t just get a makeover, it literally incinerates itself. It has to reduce itself to ash before the new version can rise. The message has been the same for thousands of years: creation and destruction aren’t opposites, they’re partners.
Yet, in our modern lives, we do everything we can to resist this process. We cling to our “deadwood”—those outdated beliefs about who we are, the friendships that have turned draining but feel historic, the career goals we set at twenty that no longer resonate at thirty. We hold onto them because the familiarity of the old is safer than the terrifying openness of the new. We’d rather be cluttered and stagnant than empty and open, because emptiness feels like loss.
The snake, the skin and the ego.
Nietzsche captured the biological necessity of this shedding process when he wrote, “The snake that cannot shed its skin perishes.” It’s a visceral image. The snake doesn’t shed its skin because it’s bored, it sheds it because the old skin has become a prison. If it clings too tightly to a casing that’s become too small, it suffocates.
For us, that “skin” is usually our ego. We get very attached to the story of who we are. I’m the reliable one. I’m the successful one. I’m the victim. These identities might have served us well at one point—maybe they even protected us—but eventually, they start to constrict.
The problem is that shedding that skin often feels like dying. In Jungian psychology, this is framed as “psychic death.” It’s the dissolution of the ego’s constructed identity to make way for the true self. Jung compared us to onions with many skins, noting that we have to peel ourselves again and again to get to the core—and that the peeling causes tears. It’s painful work confronting the Shadow.
It brings to mind that moment in Rainer Maria Rilke’s famous poem, Archaic Torso of Apollo. The narrator is looking at a headless statue, admiring its power and “legendary” quality, when suddenly he feels an imperative radiating from the stone: “You must change your life.” It’s not a suggestion, it’s a realization that the current container of your life is no longer sufficient for the spirit trying to live inside it.
The biology of subtraction.
This isn’t just poetry and philosophy, though. It’s biology. Our brains engage in this logic naturally through a process called synaptic pruning. As we mature, the brain eliminates neural connections that aren’t being used. It’s a biological edit, by stripping away the noise, the remaining signals become clearer and faster. We are literally wired to function better by burning off the excess.
This aligns with the principle of via negativa—improvement by removal. We’re obsessed with adding, but often the biggest leap forward comes from what we stop doing. It’s the Marie Kondo approach applied to the soul. If a habit, a belief, or a relationship doesn’t spark life, it’s just clutter.
Writer Joan Didion understood the melancholy of this perfectly when she wrote, “I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be.” It’s such a gentle way to put it, but it implies a hard truth: the price of a new life is the old one. We have to lose touch with those past selves… we have to let them drift into memory so we aren’t dragging their ghosts into our future.
Antifragility: thriving on the burn.
The irony, of course, is that by refusing to light the match, we aren’t staying safe, we’re actually making ourselves fragile.
Nassim Taleb talks about the concept of “antifragility”—systems that actually get stronger under stress. For example, a muscle needs the micro-tears of lifting weights to grow back stronger. It needs the damage. The Stoics understood this, too. Marcus Aurelius wrote, “The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.” He wasn’t just talking about grit, he was talking about using the fuel of adversity to feed your own fire.
When we avoid the controlled burns of life, we deny ourselves that strengthening process. We protect our vulnerabilities so fiercely that they never have the chance to callous over into strengths. By maintaining a pristine, unburned facade, we create a situation where we can’t handle heat.
If you don’t perform the controlled burn yourself, life has a funny way of doing it for you. This is the wildfire. This is the midlife crisis that blows up a marriage, or the sudden layoff that shatters your sense of worth. These are the fires that happen when the deadwood has piled up too high. A controlled burn is painful, yes, but it’s strategic. It’s a choice.
The clearing.
So, what does a controlled burn actually look like? It’s rarely as dramatic as selling all your possessions and uprooting your entire life. Usually, it’s quieter.
It looks like the difficult conversation you’ve been avoiding, or admitting you were wrong about a deeply held belief, or stepping away from a “perfect” career path because it makes you feel dead inside. As James Baldwin wisely noted, “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
We have to face the pile of dry leaves. We have to strike the match.
There’s a famous haiku by a 17th-century Japanese samurai and poet, Mizuta Masahide, that I think about all the time:
My barn having burned down, I can now see the moon.1
It’s such a profound reframing of disaster. The barn represented safety, storage, and the known world. It was the structure that defined the poet’s life.. but it also blocked the view. It was only when the structure was removed—violently, by fire—that he could see the moon, a symbol of enlightenment and a perspective that had been there all along, hidden behind his own security.
Becoming who we are requires us to be the ranger of our own lives. We have to walk the perimeter, check the underbrush, and recognize when it’s time to burn. It’s scary to stand in the smoke of your own history, watching things turn to ash, but there’s a peace on the other side of it. Because when the smoke clears, you aren’t left with nothing. You’re left with the fertile ground, the open sky, and the space to finally grow.
PS: If you enjoyed this post, I recommend “What to do right now if you want 2026 to actually matter” or “How to audit your year (without lying to yourself)” next.
This poem is sometimes also translated as “house” rather than “barn,” but I prefer it this way.
The “art of subtraction” is is a characteristic of good design-in products, systems, architecture. The application of this approach is universal.
This post called me out for clinging onto some "deadwood" but was also a message I really needed to hear 🫶