There’s no denying we live complex lives, even when we think we can get away, get off the grid, become a hermit. The physical needs alone call for at least some complexity, some organizing. We can’t, for example, spoil the water we drink, and we can’t find protection from insects, animals, and the weather without adding a layer of complexity. I’m imagining the dwellers of the rock shelter called Meadowcroft, where people lived as many as 13 to 16 millennia ago. Why live beneath a rock shelter perched high above a stream? Human reasoning: bears; wolves; snakes; and other humans with not-so-friendly intentions. Still, a relatively simple lifestyle compared to yours, right? So, why all the additional complexity? Is it our nature to complicate everything?
And then there are those movements: Hippies in communes going back many centuries. Call them monks and nuns; call them Brook Farm enthusiasts in the nineteenth century; call them “off-the-grid” today. In art? Dada. In music? From folk to Baroque and back to folk or coffee shop with an acoustic guitar, and maybe even rap. Apparently, there’s a periodic need for simplicity that emerges to counter the complexity. Thoreau going off into the woods and writing, “Simplify your life…Simplify!” Of course, one wonders why he needed to add the second “simplify.” Well, those are the words he wrote with his pencil.
Tools and possible evidence for the use of controlled fire in the Tabun cave in Israel apparently date back more than 300,000 years. From chipped stones (and probably sharpened branches) to pencils and Swiss watches, we’ve added complexity to our lives (but then, chipping petroglyphs is laborious and sundials don’t work at night). Overwhelmed by our own inventiveness, we take a step “back” as we believe “back” means to recapture that imagined simple life and simpler times. Yet, every step “back” has its own layers, its own complexity.
As the people of Brook Farm discovered in the nineteenth century, a simple communal life falls apart when individuals fail to cooperate, that is, to pitch in to help with the work necessary to keep everyone fed. That should make us realize that the desire for some kind of social Dadaism will always fail when two or more individuals gather. I can’t imagine a group in Tabun cave or Meadowcroft rock shelter rejecting the more complex tools of our time—at least initially. We appear to be drawn toward complexity while we say we reject it. The Amish using a wheel and a metal hammer to help in a barn raising with squared wooded beams cut by metal saws or purchased at the lumber yard; the Mennonites using a car; the Franciscans wearing sandals with buckles or Velcro and choosing a cassock of appropriate size and material; and a Buddhist forging a bell and donning a robe called a kāṣāya, a triple-robe composed of the antarvāsa, the uttarāsaṅga, and the saṃghāti. How simple. Simple how?
Of course, if you do live in a lean-to off the grid, where you eat some insects and mushrooms, you aren’t reading this. No, off the grid you’ve achieved some simplicity, some romantic ideal of living one-with-Nature.
I live in a different world, a place of tools, machines, controlled energy, and complex interactions that include getting fruits and vegetables from places far away. I might desire some simplicity, but I keep going back to complexity, just as Thoreau left Walden Pond to return to society, serving his contemporaries by inventing a machine for grinding graphite and one for injecting it into wood to make pencils. His inventions “simplified” the pencil-making process.
If you are reading this, you’re obviously “on the grid.” And if you are “on the grid,” you are surrounded by complexity. In fact, you add to it, even when you say you want to “get away.” How, for example, will you “get away”? Car, plane, bike, good hiking shoes, well-worn path, spa in Arizona, mountain-top retreat you reach while wearing Gortex? Living the “simple life” is relative and often a fiction we frame as an ideal.
You’re complex. Face it. Deal with it. Revel in it. Just don’t get lost in it. And that’s where you can achieve your simplicity: knowing how to put all you know, do, and use in perspective without claiming a simplicity that you contradict in that knowing, doing, and using.
We are hypocrites when we talk about simplicity. Take Einstein, for example, a guy who said that the simplest explanation is worth achieving, that an elegant mathematical explanation is the simplest. With regard to education he seemed to suggest that less is more: “it is…vital to a valuable education that independent critical thinking be developed in the young…a development that is greatly jeopardized by overburdening…with too much and with too varied subjects…Overburdening necessarily leads to superficiality” (p. 67).* Yet, Einstein combined a complex geometry and physics to achieve his “simple” explanation of space-time. Would he have been as creative had he learned only Euclidean geometry and Newtonian physics? Should he have ignored Riemannian geometry as an unnecessary layer of complexity and another subject that merely increased an “overburdening” of his mind?
Really, Albert? Here’s another view. Delve into as much complexity as you can. You will find your brain enriched and more creative as you put together thoughts and knowledge in new ways and invent what others have missed, all the way back to those ancient cave and rock shelter dwellers. Go ahead. Add some complexity; don’t be afraid of it. You can always choose to ignore it in your search for simplicity. Having all that complexity allows you to make a relative “simplicity” of your choosing.
*Einstein, Albert. Ideas and Opinions. New York. Crown Publishers, Inc. 1954, 1982. Based on Mein Weltbild, ed. Carl Seelig, trans. by Sonja Bargmann.
And then there are those movements: Hippies in communes going back many centuries. Call them monks and nuns; call them Brook Farm enthusiasts in the nineteenth century; call them “off-the-grid” today. In art? Dada. In music? From folk to Baroque and back to folk or coffee shop with an acoustic guitar, and maybe even rap. Apparently, there’s a periodic need for simplicity that emerges to counter the complexity. Thoreau going off into the woods and writing, “Simplify your life…Simplify!” Of course, one wonders why he needed to add the second “simplify.” Well, those are the words he wrote with his pencil.
Tools and possible evidence for the use of controlled fire in the Tabun cave in Israel apparently date back more than 300,000 years. From chipped stones (and probably sharpened branches) to pencils and Swiss watches, we’ve added complexity to our lives (but then, chipping petroglyphs is laborious and sundials don’t work at night). Overwhelmed by our own inventiveness, we take a step “back” as we believe “back” means to recapture that imagined simple life and simpler times. Yet, every step “back” has its own layers, its own complexity.
As the people of Brook Farm discovered in the nineteenth century, a simple communal life falls apart when individuals fail to cooperate, that is, to pitch in to help with the work necessary to keep everyone fed. That should make us realize that the desire for some kind of social Dadaism will always fail when two or more individuals gather. I can’t imagine a group in Tabun cave or Meadowcroft rock shelter rejecting the more complex tools of our time—at least initially. We appear to be drawn toward complexity while we say we reject it. The Amish using a wheel and a metal hammer to help in a barn raising with squared wooded beams cut by metal saws or purchased at the lumber yard; the Mennonites using a car; the Franciscans wearing sandals with buckles or Velcro and choosing a cassock of appropriate size and material; and a Buddhist forging a bell and donning a robe called a kāṣāya, a triple-robe composed of the antarvāsa, the uttarāsaṅga, and the saṃghāti. How simple. Simple how?
Of course, if you do live in a lean-to off the grid, where you eat some insects and mushrooms, you aren’t reading this. No, off the grid you’ve achieved some simplicity, some romantic ideal of living one-with-Nature.
I live in a different world, a place of tools, machines, controlled energy, and complex interactions that include getting fruits and vegetables from places far away. I might desire some simplicity, but I keep going back to complexity, just as Thoreau left Walden Pond to return to society, serving his contemporaries by inventing a machine for grinding graphite and one for injecting it into wood to make pencils. His inventions “simplified” the pencil-making process.
If you are reading this, you’re obviously “on the grid.” And if you are “on the grid,” you are surrounded by complexity. In fact, you add to it, even when you say you want to “get away.” How, for example, will you “get away”? Car, plane, bike, good hiking shoes, well-worn path, spa in Arizona, mountain-top retreat you reach while wearing Gortex? Living the “simple life” is relative and often a fiction we frame as an ideal.
You’re complex. Face it. Deal with it. Revel in it. Just don’t get lost in it. And that’s where you can achieve your simplicity: knowing how to put all you know, do, and use in perspective without claiming a simplicity that you contradict in that knowing, doing, and using.
We are hypocrites when we talk about simplicity. Take Einstein, for example, a guy who said that the simplest explanation is worth achieving, that an elegant mathematical explanation is the simplest. With regard to education he seemed to suggest that less is more: “it is…vital to a valuable education that independent critical thinking be developed in the young…a development that is greatly jeopardized by overburdening…with too much and with too varied subjects…Overburdening necessarily leads to superficiality” (p. 67).* Yet, Einstein combined a complex geometry and physics to achieve his “simple” explanation of space-time. Would he have been as creative had he learned only Euclidean geometry and Newtonian physics? Should he have ignored Riemannian geometry as an unnecessary layer of complexity and another subject that merely increased an “overburdening” of his mind?
Really, Albert? Here’s another view. Delve into as much complexity as you can. You will find your brain enriched and more creative as you put together thoughts and knowledge in new ways and invent what others have missed, all the way back to those ancient cave and rock shelter dwellers. Go ahead. Add some complexity; don’t be afraid of it. You can always choose to ignore it in your search for simplicity. Having all that complexity allows you to make a relative “simplicity” of your choosing.
*Einstein, Albert. Ideas and Opinions. New York. Crown Publishers, Inc. 1954, 1982. Based on Mein Weltbild, ed. Carl Seelig, trans. by Sonja Bargmann.
RSS Feed