Simplify, simplify!

Why is everything so complicated?

Our kitchens are cluttered with tools that beg to be used – the toaster, the air fryer, the electric tea kettle, the espresso machine, next to a stove and oven that does it all. And don’t forget the 3-in-1 avocado tool. You can cut, pit, slice, and scoop, all with a single tool?!? My grandmother would probably call it a 3-1 dust collector, but sign me up!

Packing for a trip? Don’t forget the sleeping bag. Or the mini inflatable pillow. Or the pillowcase for the mini inflatable pillow. Or the case for the pillowcase for the mini inflatable pillow. Or the zipper-fixer-upper kit, you know, just in case.

A warning light has been on in my car for ages. I don’t think twice about it now, but at first, I thought I had a flat every time the thing beeped. One more thing to worry about. Ask your greasy neighborhood mechanic and they’ll tell you that “they don’t make ‘em like they used to.”

Consider language. Preparing a report for work? Let’s include as many big words as possible so that they think that we know what we’re talking about. There’s corporate legalese, or a military memo – as William Zinsser points out, the Air Force missile didn’t crash, it “impacted the ground prematurely.”

Clutter bogs us down.

Moving? More stuff = more time. And once all those boxes are unpacked, all the extra stuff can be moved again, to a shiny new storage unit. That stinks!

Personal ambitions, a desire to learn new things? When the going gets tough, let’s move on to the next one. We can work on the entire to-do list at once, right? The more “flux capacitors” and “recursive network architectures” we can add to our vocabulary, the better understanding we’ll have, and other people will think we have (and boy do we care what other people think about us!).

I’m calling BS! Pascal said that our unhappiness is because we “cannot sit quietly in our chamber.” Our desire for mental and material growth has us racing forward, often forgetting to stop and smell the roses. The clutter it creates prevents true understanding and sucks up the most precious thing that we need to live – time.

Simplicity gives us freedom.

My girlfriend and I moved recently and donated a third of our belongings. That’s a third less stuff to move, a third less time spent moving, and more time to do what we want. And it felt goooood. 

That new thing you’re learning? Simplicity also allows for true understanding of what interests us. That means that you can explain it to the five year old with the dripping popsicle and rainbow colored hat with the spinny-thing on top (IYKYK), and even he gets it (Nobel-prize winning physicist and life junkie Richard Feynman had plenty to say about this).

So how can we be more simple? 

Clearly, more stuff and more information is not the answer, or else “we’d all be billionaires with perfect abs,” says Derek Sivers. And we obviously aren’t all Jeff Bezos (he’s kinda jacked). More, more, more (!!!) causes anxiety and places us where we don’t know what to do with it all.

We have to be better at doing and consuming less.

Oliver Burkeman, in his excellent book 4,000 Hours: Time Management for Mortals, says that if you feel that every moment should be spent in service of future goals, you’ll postpone fulfillment to a time that never arrives. Constantly working on a project or upgrading those kitchen gadgets makes gratitude harder to feel now. I’m guilty of this – reading that was one helluva lightbulb moment for me.

So next time you’re banging your head against the wall writing that report, get it all out first, and admit that it’s probably more complicated than it needs to be. Remove anything that doesn’t help you say what you want to your audience. It’ll be easier for them to understand and will also improve your own understanding.

Or if you’re dreading a move, ask what you really need, and give the rest to others that are needier. You’ll feel better for helping others and you’ll gain the one thing that can’t be bought or given – time.