The more you care for your mental health, the more you realize how unnecessary and superficial other things are. — Maxime Lagacé
—What lingers after this line?
A Shift in What Feels Important
Maxime Lagacé’s line captures a quiet reversal: the more deliberately you care for your mind, the less convincing many external pressures become. Goals once treated as urgent—keeping up appearances, winning every argument, collecting achievements for their own sake—start to feel strangely weightless. This isn’t indifference so much as discernment. As you invest in mental well-being, you begin noticing which pursuits consistently nourish you and which merely demand attention. From that vantage point, “unnecessary” doesn’t mean never enjoyable; it means no longer central to a life you’re trying to sustain.
Why Well-Being Exposes the Superficial
Once mental health becomes a priority, it functions like a filter. You become more sensitive to the difference between what provides genuine meaning and what merely offers a brief hit of validation. In that way, caring for the mind doesn’t add a new obsession; it removes background noise. This connects to insights in psychology about values and well-being. For example, Self-Determination Theory (Deci & Ryan, 1985) distinguishes intrinsic needs—autonomy, competence, relatedness—from extrinsic pursuits like status and image; prioritizing the former tends to increase well-being, which in turn makes the latter feel less compelling.
Boundaries as a Mental Health Practice
As this clarity grows, boundaries start to look less like selfishness and more like basic maintenance. Protecting sleep, limiting draining conversations, and saying no to obligations that routinely spike anxiety become practical expressions of self-care rather than moral failures. In everyday terms, someone might notice that a weekly social event leaves them depleted and irritable for two days afterward. Instead of forcing attendance to avoid judgment, they choose rest or a smaller meet-up. That decision can feel like losing something at first, but it often reveals how much energy was being spent performing rather than living.
Relationships: Depth Over Performance
With boundaries in place, relationships often reorganize themselves. Superficial connections—those built mainly on convenience, gossip, or one-sided support—tend to fade when you stop overextending. Meanwhile, healthier relationships can deepen because they’re no longer propped up by constant availability or people-pleasing. Importantly, this doesn’t require dramatic confrontation. It can be as simple as responding more slowly, declining plans without elaborate excuses, or steering conversations away from comparison and toward honesty. Over time, the people who remain are often those who can tolerate your wholeness, not just your usefulness.
Consumer Noise and the Myth of “More”
From there, it becomes easier to see how much modern life equates “more” with “better.” When you’re actively tending to mental health, you may recognize that certain purchases, upgrades, and hustle narratives are less about joy and more about soothing insecurity. This mirrors research on hedonic adaptation (Brickman & Campbell, 1971), which suggests that the emotional boost from new acquisitions often fades quickly. As a result, investing in mental stability can reduce the urge to chase constant novelty, because you’re less reliant on external stimuli to regulate internal states.
Not Less Living—More Intentional Living
Finally, Lagacé’s point isn’t a call to shrink your life into nothing but self-optimization. Rather, it implies that mental health care returns you to what is sturdy: meaningful work, restorative rest, honest friendships, simple pleasures, and values you can live with. What falls away is mostly the performative layer—the frantic proving, the compulsive comparison, the need to be seen doing life “correctly.” In its place, priorities become cleaner and kinder, and the world feels less like a contest and more like a place where you can choose what deserves your attention.
One-minute reflection
What does this quote ask you to notice today?
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