More is not necessarily better

    How many times have you not walked into a home or office in Puerto Rico with the air conditioner turned on 'a todo fuete' (maximum power), cooling the place to turn it into the Antarctic?  It seems to me that here in Puerto Rico, as in so many other places, we tend to presume that "more is better".  We may observe this presumption in a number of circumstances: the car faster than the Concorde, the house so totally illuminated as if it were day, the speaker turned up to such volume that it can be heard blocks away, etc.  We presume that wealth consists in "more of X", whatever that may be.   More is better.  Nonetheless, medicine and other professions show us that more is not better, but just the contrary: it is toxic.  Water, more curial an element to life than food,in excessive quantities can be ruinous to the body.  The same might be said for oxygen, which only consists of 205 of the air we breathe.  Similarly, drugs consumed in excessive amount are dangerous to the body, curiously demonstrated by interactions between Western medicine in Colonial Africa.  More is NOT better, and well-being actually consists in maintaining a delicate ideal balance.  this mentality is somewhat foreign to us, to such a degree that it is somewhat shocking when we first come into contact with it.  "What do you mean you are not going to lower the temperature to 65 degrees?  How dare you?!"  The care that goes faster only increases its chances of contributing to a tragedy; traveling 80 miles per hour in a few miles only cuts one or other minute from the trip, but drastically increases the possibility of a mortal accident.  Illuminating the streets as if it were a Christmás tree, while ignoring important sessions that have no illumination whatsoever is also to commit an anti-rational crime.  More is NOT necessarily better.