It’s easy to imagine your perfect life as a masterpiece. Something you slave away over… until, one day, it’s finished and you get to hang it on the wall for you to glory in and others to admire.
But it’s not like that at all.
A good life is a changing thing — how you spend each unique, passing day. It must naturally grow, shift, evolve, and pulsate with life.
Your life can never be static. It’s a system — a set of interconnected, moving parts. So if your target is something that never changes then you’re automatically leaving the ‘machinery’ to chance… and you’ll end up with a dysfunctional mess.
You need to deliberately design for a good life. And this has implications.
You want the system you’re creating to work rather than just look pretty and impressive. And it needs to keep working over the years (through ups and downs and all the challenges life can throw at it and at you).
So it had better be simple.
Good luck creating something complex that works right out of the box. Or that isn’t prone to constant breakdowns. Or requires more time devoted to maintenance than on basking in the joy of untrammelled easy running.
Aiming for simplicity is what makes it possible for you to create your ‘life system’ and have a hope of it fitting the design spec.
A lean and simple design is also more robust. There’s simply less to go wrong.
Every unnecessary moving part increases the likelihood of failure — either that you’ve designed the ‘machine’ incorrectly in the first place, or that some vital part will break down. Plus, a simple setup makes it much easier to diagnose the problem, and then fix things if (when!) things do go wrong.
You’re not quite done yet, though. You still want to demand that the simple life we create possesses one further quality — elegance.
Simply making a simple system doesn’t guarantee that it will do what you need it. Or that it will be a ‘good’ answer or an ‘effective’ answer to your desired problem.
Elegance is the sign that you’ve achieved the right sort of simplicity. It’s what emerges when you have stripped things down to the essentials and discarded everything else. That’s how you know that you’ve achieved not just simplicity, but a simplicity that is fit for purpose.