Samenvatting

Always striving for superlatives makes for one-dimensional judgements. From one perspective something can be the best or the most unique, but from an infinite number of other perspectives it isn't. The fastest runner is not necessarily the healthiest person, let alone the best partner or parent. In addition, thinking in superlatives leads to uniformity instead of diversity. With all our innovations and our pursuit of better, more beautiful and more luxurious things, we are now worse off than: as a species we are as dependent on nature as all other living species while it is undeniable that technological progress causes ecological deterioration. It is argued that more is not always better, so we should stop living (exclusively) for exclamation marks!