Complexity
basic manageability is achieved for a given level of complexity
For example:
- Graduate from college/vocational training/etc. That’s a high-complexity management task, but when it’s done, it’s done.
- Ramp up into a career. Another complex, difficult task. Once you’re up to speed at work, though, you’re up to speed at work.
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Once #1 and #2 are done, immediately jumping into another high-complexity situation. For example, getting married, buying a house, going back to school part-time, or getting involved in civil society (PTA, fire department, etc).
Those are all good things, but piling on complexity too quickly is a common malady. In fact, I see some people pile on #3 while #1 is in progress. Marriage, kids, and a mortgage while you’re still in medical school? That’s wild!I think a few phenomena cause us to take on too much:
- Things like going back to school are implicitly pitched as having the effect of lowering life complexity. For example, better degree equals better job.
That’s only after the fact, though. In the midst of it, they’re high complexity tasks…often much higher than anticipated.
One doesn’t just buy a home. It’s finding a good real estate agent, researching the neighborhood, home inspections, radon, termites, smoke alarms, mold, interest rates, mortgage applications, credit lines, debt-to-income ratios, resale potential, market trends, neighbors, HVAC, water drainage slopes, water infiltration, structural issues, “Buyers are Liars & Sellers are Too!” (tinyurl.com/5n6vey23), price and tax history, zoning, HOAs, ADUs, flood zones, liens, water potability, earnest money, attorneys, title searches, closing companies, boundary surveys, moving vans, and so on. - The mind underestimates its current level of complexity. If one actually writes down all the thing one’s “managing” at a given time, it tends to be a surprisingly long list.
Everything from semi-funky relationships to remembering to get an oil change.
- The mind takes on new complexity as a way to distract from existing complexity. Drugs are a good example.
I’ve never done drugs or alcohol, but they seem to immediately add massive life complexity.
It would be interesting to couch things in that way talking to kids about drugs. Might be more effective than a moralizing approach.
In Japanese culture, there’s a popular idea of “Subtraction thinking” (https://www.ilii.jp/ili-zine/book/20240919-2.html?utm_source=chatgpt.com). In other words, eliminate the problem, rather than trying to add a solution to the problem. A big difference. - Complexity removal “shortcuts”, like going “off-grid” in an RV in a national park.
Being off-grid an RV in a national park means that you’ll going to have to figure out your showering situation.
A gravity-fed shower you hang from a tree branch, for example.
The trouble comes in the winter, when the shower will be freezing cold.
You have to figure out and maintain a system for hot water with your gravity-fed shower that’s hung from a tree branch.
The shower situation has quickly become more complicated than just hopping in a normal shower in a normal house.
Plus, you’ll be dealing with snarky comments about the shower situation, from nearly everyone you know.
As the lyrics of an old Eagles song say, “every refuge has its price”.
- Paradoxically, at times of high complexity, it’s human to reach for the fixes (e.g. drugs, alcohol) that add the most complexity. Mesolimbic pathway and all that.
There’s many a tale of a person who in the same week loses their job and is diagnosed with a serious illness, and turns to the bottle to cope.
Now that person has three problems, not two. And the alcoholism is perhaps the most complex of the three.
Clinically, this is characterized by the Diathesis-stress model: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diathesis%E2%80%93stress_model.
“Diathesis” refers to a person’s innate tolerance for complexity and stress. In the case of the person with the bad week, the Diathesis-stress model provides the etiology of substance use disorder. The pathological weight of complexity itself is characterized by psychological concepts such as cognitive load, set-shifting, and decision fatigue.
Likewise, sociologically by concepts such as role strain and role conflict. In other words, being two different people in two different areas of your life.
- Things like going back to school are implicitly pitched as having the effect of lowering life complexity. For example, better degree equals better job.
That’s only after the fact, though. In the midst of it, they’re high complexity tasks…often much higher than anticipated.
The brain detests complexity.
Another large factor is the society into which one is embedded.
The social diathesis of The United States, for example, is very low. Of Sweden, very high.
Approximately 60% of Americans live paycheck-to-paycheck. Healthcare is tied to your job - the only industrialized nation on Earth to do so.
Even many full-time jobs, such as at restaurants, don’t offer healthcare.
If Americans seem stressed, that’s why. They’re one small mistake away from quite possibly literal death.
Low diathesis. I’m continually amazed by how civil and reasonable the average American is in spite of the macroeconomic Venus Fly Trap in which they’re embedded.
Years ago, I saw an interview with a man who was seeking help in life, for himself and his 3 children. I certainly felt for him and his situation. Yet after a moment the thought came to mind: if you weren’t 100% sure you could provide for your first child, why did you have the first child? Surely not a second? And a third?
Also years ago, I read a short essay by a man who had adopted a child when he was around 50 years old.
By that time, he was established in his career - as an MD/PhD oncologist, as it happened.
He was also settled into his romantic relationship with his partner. He was in excellent shape financially.
In fact, he gave up one of his two roles: research or clinical medicine (I don’t recall which) in order to spend more time with his child.
Finally, he said, there was a certain je ne sais quois of groundedness that came with age. Knowing himself as a person and knowing how to interact with the world.
"Simplify, simplify, simplify! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail."
-Henry David Thoreau https://xenon.stanford.edu/~rfoon/files/quotes/files/thoreau.html