What’s complicated about simplicity
There are several hundred thousand drink combinations at your local Starbucks. We make more choices in a day than our ancestors were in a year. To cope, we must simplify. Yet simplification is dangerous if we forget that our simplification is only an approximation.
Or, to put it simply: the map is not the territory.
You’re not pessimistic or optimistic. You’re not good or bad. You’re not liberal nor conservative. I like Nassim Taleb’s take:
“I am, at the Fed level, libertarian; at the state level, Republican; at the local level, Democrat; and at the family and friends level, a socialist.”
Simple, but not too simple. This context-aware take allows you to make more accurate decisions and feel better before, during, and after those decisions.
Out of chaos, we seek order. But from order comes chaos. Christianity began as a movement within Judaism before becoming the most practiced religion in the world. Yet over time, Christianity split into three branches: Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox. Further splitting continued amongst those respective branches. Now there are Methodists, Lutherans, Baptists, and Quakers, just to name a few.
Simple means fluid, not fixed. How can you keep all the stimuli around you manageable while still being flexible to be wrong in a way to make things right? And right in a way that doesn’t cause wrong?
Take stock. Where are you too simplified? Where are you not simplified enough?
How detailed should your map be for each significant territory of your life?