Hell Yeah or No

The filter I run on anything new arriving in my life is: hell yeah, or no.

If the answer to should I do this isn’t a full-body hell yeah, the answer is no. Not “let me think about it.” Not “let me see if I can fit it in.” No. The middle of that spectrum — the meh, sure, I guess, the it would be good for me, the I should probably — is where most adult lives quietly drown. The meh shit is the killer. The meh shit fills the calendar, eats the hours, and leaves no room for the things that would have actually been hell-yeah if there had been room left for them. Then the year is over and you wonder where it went. It went to the meh.

I don’t want meh in my life. I want the things that are honestly good — for the body, for the marriage, for the work, for the friends in the ring I’ve actually drawn — and I want enough margin to do those well. That requires the discipline to say no to almost everything, including a lot of things that aren’t bad. Most of what I say no to is fine. Fine is the enemy. Fine is what fills the cracks. Fine adds up to a wasted decade.

There’s a pathology of priorities I’ve been watching for a long time, and I want to put a name to it.

The political left, in its current form, has a hundred priorities. Climate. Equity. Healthcare. Housing. Education. Labor rights. Reproductive rights. Trans rights. Immigration. Criminal justice. Police reform. Wealth taxes. Drug decriminalization. The Palestinian cause. Indigenous land. Body autonomy. Disability access. Animal welfare. The list keeps growing every year, and the list is the failure mode, because no coalition can apply real pressure to a hundred things at once. The result is that the left has, for thirty years, talked about all of these and won effectively none of them at the federal level in a durable way. The hundred-priority approach is structurally guaranteed to lose, and the side running it can mistake the loss for insufficient enthusiasm and respond by adding a hundred-and-first priority. The losing accelerates.

The right has been the opposite, and the contrast is worth sitting with even if you don’t like the outcome.

The activist right, after Roe in 1973, decided that overturning Roe was the priority. Not the only one — they cared about taxes and guns and a few other things — but the abortion question was the generational priority, and the apparatus organized itself around it. Judicial selection. State-level legislation. Litigation strategy. Voter mobilization. Theological framing. Decade after decade. They lost cases. They lost elections. They lost cultural skirmishes. They kept the priority. In 2022 they got what they’d been organizing for since the year Nixon resigned. Fifty years of focused work, against a hostile cultural environment, by a coalition that was outspent and outmedia’d for most of that span, and they got the result they’d set as the priority. You can be horrified by the outcome — many people I know are — and you can also recognize that the mechanism that produced it is one of the most impressive demonstrations of long-term political discipline in modern American history. The right picked one thing, held the line for fifty years, and won.

Given the demographic math, baby killing isn’t coming back on the menu for a long while. The cohort that wanted to keep it legal is also the cohort that isn’t reproducing, and the people who are reproducing are the people who organized the win. The arc isn’t a partisan prediction. It’s a spreadsheet. The two trajectories converge to a country in which a small handful of focused priorities keeps winning against a sprawling list of unfocused ones, generation after generation, until the loser-coalition either gets disciplined or disappears.

Stripped of partisanship, the lesson is that priorities have a carrying capacity. A human can hold maybe three priorities at the level required to actually move them. A household can hold maybe two. A political coalition can hold maybe one over a generation. Past those numbers, the priorities stop being priorities and become a list of things you wish were true. A wish list isn’t a priority list, and the world responds to priority lists and ignores wish lists, on every scale from personal to civilizational.

This is the hardest activity a human can engage in. Saying yes is easy. The world keeps handing you opportunities, requests, ideas, invitations, obligations, projects, side quests, causes, and the default mode of a polite social adult is to keep saying sure until the calendar is full and the body is tired and the year is gone. The mature move is to say no, on purpose, to almost everything, including things that are good and things that are interesting and things that would be flattering to be a part of. The mature move is to look at the small set of priorities that are actually yours, and protect them like the marriage they secretly are.

An Amazon VP told me, years ago, a thing I’ve never forgotten. He said he showed up to work every morning and the first thing he did was decide how he was going to fail that day. Meaning: which of the demands on his calendar, which of the requests, which of the half-finished initiatives, which of the people pulling at his time, he was going to let down. He couldn’t satisfy all of them. The job at his level was an inbox of more demands than any human could meet. The work wasn’t deciding what to do; it was deciding what to not do — which fires to let burn, which threads to drop, which colleagues to disappoint that day. The successful version of his job was choosing the failures on purpose, in service of the small set of things that were actually load-bearing. The failed version — and he had watched many peers fall into it — was trying to satisfy everyone, succeeding at none of it, and burning out inside two years.

That story has been in my head for fifteen years, because it described, in plain operational terms, the thing the rest of the productivity industry has been failing to describe for decades. You’re not going to do it all. You were never going to do it all. The question is whether you choose the failures or whether the failures choose themselves, and the people who choose them win and the people who don’t burn out.

So here’s the move, in my house, in 2026.

I have a small list of priorities and I defend it like a wall. The body. The marriage. The household. The site you’re reading. The land I’m moving toward. The small inner ring of people I would fight for. That’s the entire list. Other things get done — the mowing, the cooking, the occasional technical project, the conversation with the friend who’s in town — but they don’t get priority status. Priority means it gets defended when something else tries to displace it. Priority means the calendar gets cleared for it without negotiation. Priority means the answer to “should I do this competing thing instead” is no by default.

The hardest part of the discipline, and I’ll say this plainly so the reader doesn’t skip past it, is that most of what you say no to is fine. That’s the trap. If everything you said no to were obviously bad, the discipline would be easy. The discipline is hard because the things you have to refuse are usually nice, often well-intentioned, sometimes flattering, occasionally genuinely good — and you have to say no to them anyway, because you’ve already said yes to the things that matter more, and you can’t add more yes without removing some of the yes you’ve already committed to.

It is what it is. The carrying capacity is what it is. The hours in a week are what they are. The body’s recovery budget is what it is. The marriage’s attention requirement is what it is. The number of real friendships a human can maintain is what it is. Pretending the constraints aren’t real is the polite modern delusion that produces lives full of meh.

So pick the few. Pick them on purpose, when you’re sober and clear-headed and not under pressure from the immediate ask in front of you. Write them down somewhere you can return to. Draw the line around them. Hold the line. Decide, every morning, how you’re going to fail today — which of the inbound demands you’re going to disappoint — and decide it in service of the few items that are actually yours. The disappointment is the price of the focus, and the focus is the only path to a life that, looking back, was actually lived.

Hell yeah. Or no.