The Art of Getting Out of the Way

There’s this thing that happens on crowded sidewalks in New York. Two people are walking toward each other in a rush, both trying to navigate around the other. One steps left, the other steps left. One corrects right, the other corrects right. And suddenly you’re doing this little dance with a stranger, each of you making it worse by trying to fix it.

I heard something recently that reframed the whole thing for me. The problem isn’t that people are clumsy or oblivious. The problem is that two people are both trying to control the same thing at the same time. Both are trying to help. And it creates a gridlock where they both end up blocking each other. One of them has to let go.

So instead of trying to solve the problem and evading the other person, I tried something different. I started doing nothing. I slow down slightly and let the other person choose. They make a move, I follow, and we’re past each other in a second. The hard part is that slowing down feels wrong. Every instinct says to move, to fix it, to be the one who figures it out. Standing there, barely moving, while someone walks toward you feels almost rude. But that discomfort is the whole point. The moment I stop trying to solve it, it solves itself.

And the failure mode, the case where both people let the other choose, seems like it would be horrible—no one would move. But actually it’s fine. We drift past each other slowly, a little awkwardly, and nothing bad happens. No collision, no real delay. The worst outcome of doing less turns out to be pretty manageable.

But it’s not just about sidewalks. I was talking to a friend recently who said, half-joking, that he needed to do less. He meant it as a complaint about being overloaded. I took it as a goal.

Oliver Burkeman makes a version of this argument in Meditations for Mortals. He pushes back on the idea that importance and difficulty are the same thing, that if something matters it should feel hard, and that easy means you’re not really trying. He offers a different question: what if this were easy? Not as a feel-good slogan, but as a way of living. What if you built your life so that the default was things that felt natural and really wanted, and the hard stuff was something you looked at deliberately and decided was worth doing.

I’ve been trying to live this way. I’m doing less and holding things more loosely. I’m noticing when I’m doing that sidewalk dance inside my own head, overcorrecting, making things harder than they need to be. The goal isn’t to stop caring. It’s to stop treating caring and straining as if they’re the same thing. When I’m doing something because I want to, I’m better at it. Not because I’m more focused or disciplined, but because I’m not fighting myself the whole time.

Getting out of the way is a skill. Whether it’s on the sidewalk or in my own head, I’m still learning it.