I remember thinking once that I should write a book on simplifying. (Maybe it was going to help me to actually do it.) I was going to call it—wait for it—decomplication. I think that’s a sad reflection of both my state of mind and my sense of humour!
But the truth is, we do lead complicated lives. As the requirement for hunting and gathering food fades further and further into the mists of our past, we fill our lives with a great deal of complication. The tools we use, the way we prepare food, the sophisticated technology we employ in the name of being entertained. We are drowning in complication.
When mankind had to spend a bigger part of his day searching out food—and when a breadmaker didn’t knead dough for him or an oven ‘ping’ when the meal was cooked (we won’t even go into the fact that many people don’t even do that much anymore)—he was more grounded. We are a civilisation of distractions and we have largely lost the ability to stick to one task for a length of time. Back then, food preparation was simple but time consuming. Now, we have increasingly complex ways to save that same time. But we use our saved time on increasingly isolating activities—texting people instead of talking to them face to face, checking social media where other people lie about how great their lives are and make us feel failures because we don’t lie enough about our own. We bombard ourselves with more, yet increasingly trivial, information. Yes, we are living complicated but strangely unsatisfying lives.
I think that’s probably why I was keen on the idea of using the very complicated (and made-up) word, decomplication. The prefix gives us the key. We somehow need to remove or reverse that complication. Just saying, let’s simplify our lives, doesn’t give us any idea for how to start. Understanding that we need to deduct something makes us aware that we need to learn to edit our lives—sift out the extraneous, the dull, the uninspiring.
I often feel a bit of a failure for the things I can’t do. I feel I have to keep up, at least to some degree. How much simpler my life would be if I lived it according to well-thought-out values and didn’t let the increasingly inane noise of society affect my decisions.