The World Is Simple
The more I realize that becoming a better person is mostly about returning to simple things.
Move daily. Eat real food. Keep your word. Work hard. Sleep well. Spend time outside. Love your people deeply. Most answers are simpler than we make them.
And there is also something about the nature of reality
The deep structure of reality is simple and stable.
The Simplicity principle - that the nature of world is inherently simple.
Simple is the state where the unessential has been removed so that an entity can better perform its purpose.
Complexity is always one of three things:
Diagnostic - a sign the frame is wrong and something needs resolving
Transitional - friction during emergence, the messy middle before things settle
Peripheral - the detail work at the edges, not the core like the village roads off the motorway- (but this is still unresolved complexity that often doesn’t need to be resolved because its at low resolution)
The nature of emergence means that the reality has some core big simple principles and they dont change much.
The complexity we generate - in institutions, philosophies, rationalizations - is often complexity against that grain.
Complexity that can’t be reduced to simple principles is often not deep complexity - it’s just mess
Simple things aligned with deep principles tend to be self-reinforcing. They don't need defending as much. They persist.
Any complexity is always short term and unresolved, its happening during emergence.
So if something is complicated then maybe it’s because its a mess.
It signals unresolved emergence - something in process, not yet settled into its stable form.
The complication isn’t the final state. It’s the friction of things finding their level.
Underneath it there is an underlying simplicty waiting to be resolved.
Persistent complexity that can't simplify is evidence of a wrong frame, not a complex reality. When you're on the right foundation, things resolve. Complexity is almost diagnostic - it tells you something hasn't found its ground yet.
Or the complexity is in the application of it the details, like roads off a motorway become smaller and more messy as they get closer to the hamlet.
These principles are especially true of business building - it can often get complex when you add different principles onto each other, but by simplifying it you can make it work much better and eliminate that complexity.
In relationships too. There’s often a lot of that adding on top of each other that can be simplified by reviewing it all and sorting it.
The Elegance Criterion: In theoretical physics and mathematics, “elegance” is often used as a literal metric for validity. Luminaries like Albert Einstein and Paul Dirac famously argued that if a formula or equation is ugly and overly complicated, it is almost certainly wrong or incomplete. True foundations resolve into beautiful, simple symmetry.
This is also interesting
When a system is healthy, the complexity we see on the surface is just the beautiful, kaleidoscopic expression of very simple rules interacting with each other. It’s like a fractal: infinitely intricate to look at, but generated by a single, simple equation.
The Law of Emergence (Andronov-Hopf Bifurcation / Chaos Theory): In complex adaptive systems, immense complexity on the surface is almost always generated by a few incredibly simple, unchanging rules at the bottom (think of a massive flock of birds moving in perfect harmony based on just three simple rules: alignment, separation, and cohesion)