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.