It’s easy to see complexity as progress. To take the view that as humanity becomes more advanced this naturally makes our lives more and more complex.
It can be a positive badge of honour. “I’m juggling lots of different things because I’m important. Because I’m capable.”
But, at its core, this complexity is laziness — taking excess, unfocused action rather than making the effort to pinpoint what really matters. And complexity’s refusal to strip away is also a form of fear.
When you’re involved in everything, you’re committed to nothing. You’re hedging your bets rather than having the courage to go irrevocably after the things you really love.
Complexity is the camouflage you use to dodge the important decisions and fool yourself. Simplicity is when you stop hiding from yourself and nail your colours to the mast.
When you renounce complexity you can no longer keep yourself busy on irrelevant things. You’re forced to seek clarity and certainty instead. To do the inner work to get right down to your core and discover what outcomes are truly important to you — and what price you’re willing to pay to achieve them.
As E. F. Schumacher said: “Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex… It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.”
There’s nowhere to hide when you embrace pure, brutal simplicity. You lay yourself bare — take full ownership of who you are and declare it to the world through where you choose to put your time and focus.
That’s scary. It takes work. It’s much easier to avoid this and fill our lives up with complexity instead. But do you really want that?
Isn’t it worth pushing through your fear to arrive at who you really are?
Mark,
This was a thought-provoking essay. I agree with your views on the challenges of complexity and the inability to focus that it creates. And simplification is necessary. I like the quote attributed to Colin Chapman of Lotus Cars, who said something like “Simplify, then add lightness.” His view of racing car design was that you weren’t finished when there was nothing else to add, but when there was nothing else to take away, which is very similar to your quote from E.F. Schumacher.
I also believe, however, that sometimes complexity is a necessary starting point, and maybe it is brave to accept that. When we tackle something new to us, and try to be innovative, or we face a new challenge, I think we naturally fall back on our past experiences to find a solution. Often that solution worked very well in another different application and is likely to not be the best solution to new problem, but it works. So then is it cowardly to start with the inelegant, unrefined solution, or is it more cowardly to tell ourselves that it isn’t the best solution and do nothing? I think your essay tells us to be brave and move from unrefined complexity to elegant simplicity in our lives, and I fully agree. But I do think that sometimes you need to be brave and accept complexity to push beyond your current boundaries.