When you wake up with a mental to-do list that makes you feel like staying in bed is really a better option.
Or you’re trying to figure out how to literally be in two places at once…because…family.
Or the thing you’re trying to solve is one you just know others have solved.
The problem isn’t merely the things we’re avoiding. It’s all of this. What we’re wrestling with isn’t just a thing. But the whole thing.
In other words, our problem is often complexity itself.
We are all familiar with the idea of complexity. That everything about life is complex and complicated. We all have a thousand things we’re all trying to do at the same time. And much like civic engineers try to figure out how to get all of us to where we need to be as quickly and safely as possible, our minds are trying to do the same thing with our existence.
And sometimes we can get a little overwhelmed. It all feels like it is just too much.
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There are basically three ways of dealing with complexity.
The first is to simplify the problem.
This is what we do when we try to take a really complicated problem and make it less so.
Simplifying a problem is a direct relief on the brain because it goes straight at the pain and discomfort caused by complexity. When our brains are on fire, simplifying the thing that is causing the fire feels like a bucket of water. Ahhh. Relaxing.
The thing about simplifying a complex problem is that doing it well is really hard. And to make up for that, we usually take short cuts. In other words, if simplifying complexity were simple, we’d all just do it. This is a bit like telling yourself to just be happy when you’re sad. It actually can work. It just doesn’t usually work that way.
Essentially, there are two methods of simplifying complexity: the summary and the theorem. Or, if you like, the Reader’s Digest vs. The Expert.
One way of simplifying a complex issue is to imagine turning a novel into a paragraph. This is usually what we do when arguing with each other on social media. Here’s the big issue and let me turn that whole big messy reality into a single, important idea…
This is obviously an effective strategy for whittling complex issues down, but a lot of what we cut away doesn’t stop being important just because it didn’t make the executive summary. Often, it is the governing by executive summary that leads us to miss essential details that continue to cause problems.
The other method is what we usually think we’re doing…or at least what we expect out of each other. Expertise in an area and familiarity with the material leads us to make decisions about what stays and what goes. Unlike the executive summary, it is expertise that leads us to pithy conclusions and brilliant analogies.
Of course, we can’t all be experts, so expertise relies on trust—that they really do know what they are doing. That we really can expect certain outcomes. And just because we rely on…financial experts, for instance…that doesn’t mean we won’t see a market crash.
The thing about simplifying a problem, regardless of method, is that it relies on taking shortcuts. And shortcuts have a way of leading to unexpected places.
The second way way we deal with complexity is to harmonize the problem.
Imagine a hundred voices singing at once. Unless they are all both 1) singing the same song 2) at the same time, it will be a cacophony—the musical form of chaos.
Harmonizing brings order to the chaos of complexity by imposing structure to the problem. In the case of all those singers, it means ordering them all to sing the same song at the same time, and most importantly, in a complementary way. In very real terms: to harmonize.
This is a pretty solid idea to bring order out of chaos, isn’t it? Well…at least if you actually have control over picking the song and the timing and the parts that everybody gets to sing. If you don’t, then…you’re really imposing an order that doesn’t inherently exist. So it might solve one problem but introduce another.
Another example of this comes from a really old problem with the Bible.
As those early followers of Jesus were sharing gospel stories and settling on what would eventually become the Bible, they quickly discovered a problem: four different gospels telling four different stories about Jesus. A lot of it matches, especially among three of them. But nowhere near everything.
When we think of the Bible as authoritative about Jesus’s life, what do we do with what looks like conflict or incompatible conditions? For some, the answer was simple: harmonize them. Make it so there is no conflict.
How exactly did they do that? It generally meant making up rules that would allow for conflicting truths to be real at the same time. So, for instance, Jesus heads to Jerusalem and goes to the Temple at the end of Mark, Matthew, and Luke. It’s part of the big climax we call The Passion. But John has Jesus visit at the beginning. So, to harmonize the four gospels we can simply say Jesus visited twice, even though the story only appears once in any one gospel.
Another famous example is how Mel Gibson rendered the last words of Jesus in his movie The Passion of the Christ. Jesus says different things from the cross in each of the gospels, but Gibson includes all of them in he movie.
Unlike simplifying, which often ignores the stuff we don’t want to deal with, harmonizing has a way of writing over that stuff like its a previous draft on the hard drive. It helps relieve the anxiety of complexity by artificially changing the problem itself.
This leads to the third way of dealing with complexity: giving up.
Complexity isn’t just overwhelming. It can feel insurmountable and eternal. And for many people who realize that we’ve too often oversimplified the problem, relying on shortcuts that keep leading to dead ends, or we’re surrounded by people trying to harmonize a complex problem that doesn’t want to be harmonized, we see no other way out.
This is especially true when we’ve spent so much time deluding ourselves or striving to make things better without the clear eyes of why the situation is complex to begin with. We can easily feel defeated. But at least it lets us be honest, right?
Well, I do think we need to face the prospect of giving up before we can face the truth.
Complexity is fueled by dishonesty and avoidance. It is the quintessential “easy way out”.
So the only way out of complexity is to stop making it so complex. Stop avoiding, lying, taking short cuts.
And start doing the work.
Because your life is full of complexity. But certain things do feel pretty simple. And I would argue that it isn’t because they are (everything is interwoven—everything is part of complexity), but because you’ve gained enough insight to transform that complexity into something we call simplicity.
Mathematicians master complex algorithms by doing the work. And then, over time, what happens? Complex ideas snap into place.
There is no real secret to solving complexity. Quite the opposite. It’s all the secrets that we think are there that make complexity into a bogeyman to frighten us, an adversary to outwit, or a monster to overcome.
And the solution is the thing we’ve been avoiding the whole time: the work.
