In a world that feels too chaotic, we often crave clarity and certainty, which can lead us to oversimplify complex events into digestible narratives. These narratives are often as comforting as they are misleading. We are drawn to clear explanations that promise to keep life’s chaos under control and offer an easy path forward, while we cling to single causes and ignore the intricate web of influences that shape our experiences.
However, this tendency toward oversimplification not only distorts our understanding of the world, events, and ourselves, but also limits our ability to grow. By accepting overly simplistic meanings, explanations, and paths, we risk missing deeper insights that could enrich our lives and relationships.
The simplification trap
We live in an age of oversimplification. Everything has to be easy, quick, and uncomplicated. If a recipe has more than three ingredients, we don’t make it. If a conversation gets too deep, we change the subject. If a book is over 200 pages long, we look for a summary online or ask Artificial Intelligence to abbreviate it for us. We have to write in paragraphs so short they seem like sentences, and sentences are already exhaled because no one wants to read anything that seems too long or complex.
We want everything to flow. Relationships to flourish effortlessly, work to bear fruit without breaking a sweat, projects to materialize quickly, and difficult emotions to go away with a five-minute meditation session.
“Keep it simple ” seems to be the leitmotif.
However, sometimes life has other plans. Full of surprises, setbacks, emotions, and conflicts, reality is complex simply because everything is interconnected and constantly changing. And that means that if we try to oversimplify it, we’ll likely lose its richness along the way.
Oversimplification denies us the possibility of understanding reality at a deeper level and condemns us to live in the illusion of a bifurcated reality. When we summarize the world as good and bad, righteous and sinners, attacked and attackers, black and white, we close our eyes to multicausality. And, therefore, the solution we find will simply be a band-aid that doesn’t address the root problems.
Oversimplification is the desire not to delve deeper. To not know. To not make the cognitive and emotional effort necessary to understand complexity. This habit inevitably leads to an unconscious dulling of our intelligence, which leads us to draw erroneous conclusions, arrive at ineffective solutions, and miss learning opportunities.
Simplifying isn’t always the solution. In fact, sometimes it’s part of the problem. Simplifying isn’t the same as eliminating what’s useless. One tries to lighten the load without much thought, while the other requires reflection, awareness, and, above all, determination.
Why do we tend to simplify life – and everything else?
Most life experiences lack a clear and defined cause. However, we are often unable to tolerate the emotional tension and confusion that complexity brings. We are then tempted to “solve” it by dividing it into two simplistic and opposing parts, usually aligning ourselves with one and rejecting the other.
In our eagerness to find meaning, we force it by creating simplified stories. We extract the most prominent (and often subjective) cause from a multitude of factors and choose an explanation that soothes our ego and allows us to evade responsibility for as long as possible. We thus turn our backs on deeper analysis and don’t even consider alternative explanations, especially if they point to a personal commitment.
These oversimplifications ease the cognitive load and comfort us with certainties that make us believe we’re in control. But this is an illusion because they only generate inaccurate representations of reality. Events, people, relationships, and things contain both positive and negative aspects.
The importance of facing complexity
Viktor Frankl, psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor, said that life isn’t about seeking pleasure, but about finding meaning. And meaning is rarely simple. It isn’t found in the immediate or the obvious, but in the profound. In what is difficult and demanding of us.
Similarly, the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard warned against existential shortcuts. For him, maturing meant being able to sustain contradiction: loving and fearing, doubting and moving forward, laughing and crying almost at the same time. Simplifying, for Kierkegaard, was a form of escapism. And he was right.
Solving a problem involves, above all, understanding it. And that requires pause and reflection to connect the dots. Learning something new almost always begins with the frustration of not understanding something. If we avoid all of that by looking for the simplest and easiest path, all we’re doing is closing the door to growth.
Obviously, accepting complexity doesn’t mean complicating things for the sake of it. It means not running away from life as it is, with its tangles, its unanswered questions, and its gray areas. It means accepting it without wanting everything to be simple, easy, and quick. A truly open mind embraces complexity, contradiction, and chaos, resisting the temptation of dichotomous and exclusive thinking.
Don’t simplify: eliminate the useless
A Japanese method for working more efficiently and organized is based on seiri (整理), which means organizing and eliminating the useless. This step involves separating the necessary from the unnecessary and eliminating non-essential items, thereby reducing clutter and freeing up space for everything to flow more smoothly. It involves leaving only what we need, in the right amount, and only when we need it.
But the important thing is that it requires analysis and reflection; it’s not simply simplifying. It’s removing what’s superfluous. Making space by eliminating the unimportant. But not out of fear of the effort, but out of love for what’s essential.
It’s not about eliminating what’s useless, what’s difficult, what’s uncomfortable, or what requires work, but what doesn’t add up. What distracts. What takes up space without adding value. That can – and should – be let go.
The difference is subtle, but important:
- Simplifying is “I don’t want to think about all that.”
- Eliminating what is useless is a “this is no longer useful to me, I don’t need it.”
One avoids. The other chooses. One erases without looking. The other refines judiciously.
How to know what is useless in your life?
It’s not always easy, because useless things often come disguised as habit, obligation, or excuses like “that’s just the way I am.” But these are some clues to start identifying – and letting go of – what you no longer need and that only gets in the way.
- Ask yourself what drains you and doesn’t contribute. There are routines, beliefs, projects, and even relationships that only drain you. If they don’t contribute to your well-being or growth, why maintain them and continue investing energy in them?
- Detect mental noise. Chronic worry, constant comparison, inherited guilt… All of these thought patterns serve no real purpose; they just keep you trapped and generate discomfort.
- Observe what you do out of habit. Zombie habits that have lost their purpose, commitments you make out of fear of disappointing someone, ideas you repeat without questioning their veracity… Dig into everything you do out of habit, because you can probably get rid of many of those things.
- Distinguish between the complex and the unnecessary. Sometimes something is difficult because it’s worth it. And sometimes it’s complicated because it no longer fits you. Learning to differentiate between these two will allow you to use your energy wisely and fight only the battles that are worth it.
- Listen to your discomfort. Not all discomfort is bad. Good discomfort makes you grow. It pushes you to explore and, over time, expands your boundaries. Useless discomfort drains you. Your body and mind know this before you do, so you’d better pay more attention to your intuition.
Psychological techniques to eliminate what no longer serves you
To begin this process of consciously eliminating what no longer contributes to you and only unnecessarily complicates your life, you can apply these techniques:
- Keep a journal of your essentials. For a week, write down each day which activities, people, or thoughts gave you energy… and which ones drained it. At the end, distinguish what you really need from what you can do without and clean up.
- The double “why” rule. Before you keep something in your life, whether it’s an object, a habit, or even a goal, ask yourself twice why you’re doing it. If you don’t find a good reason either time, you probably don’t need it.
- The day without “shoulds.” Spend a full day doing nothing out of social or self-imposed obligation. In other words, let yourself be guided by what you want to do. Notice what changes compared to your daily routine. Sometimes the uselessness comes to light when you stop doing what you’re supposed to do.
In short, life isn’t meant to be easy. It’s meant to be lived mindfully. And that includes the complicated, the challenging, and the uncomfortable. You don’t need everything to be simpler. You need everything to make sense. And to do that, sometimes you have to stop simplifying and start making an effort to understand and eliminate what gets in the way. It’s not a matter of subtracting for the sake of subtracting, but rather having just enough. Retaining what’s valuable. What helps you move forward. And letting go of the rest, because only then will you be able to keep what truly matters.
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