Despite the innate attractiveness and benefits of simplicity, stripping way excess can be a very difficult goal in practice. This article explores the power of simplicity and considers why many things tend to become more rather than less complex over time. This tendency has important ramifications for nearly everything in our lives, including our ability to understand the world around us, how well things work and our well being.

Dimensions of Simplicity

For thousands of years, simplicity has been held up as a reflection of the inner workings of the material and non-material world, a path to philosophical and scientific inquiry and a practical model to be followed. Aristotle said, perhaps observing the way a flower searches for sunlight or the amount of time it takes a baby chicken to emerge from its egg, that “nature is the shortest way.” This comment reflects the fact that everything in the natural world has a visible or unseen function and a driving force of nature appears to be, either through trial and error or as part of a larger plan, to methodically eliminate everything that is extraneous to that function.

Simplicity has also been viewed as a path that can lead us out of spiritual and scientific darkness and into the light of truth. The 14th century Franciscan friar Sir William of Occham viewed complexity as a barrier in the search for God: his ideas were subsequently formulated as the phrase “the simplest way is the best way.” Thomas Woodward, reminding his medical students at the University of Maryland that complicated diagnoses increase the likelihood of error, said, “When you hear hoofbeats, think of horses not zebras.”

In attempts to describe the world, both within us and outside of us, the most powerful aids to clarity are often division and subtraction rather than multiplication and addition. The goal of mathematics is to continually dig through the distorting impact of perceptions and arrive at fundamental quantitative relationships that express, as closely as possible, the essence of reality. So too in music: if we look at a composition and ask ourselves how to make it better we often realize that the key is removing more and more sounds until only a few notes remain. The silence in a song is sometimes its most powerful part.

The Attraction of Less

Simplicity has a major impact on functionality. The working of a machine, the delivery of a package from one side of the world to another, the choreography that brings a ballet to life and an econometric model that describes the relationship between different economic sectors are all comprised of many parts and as a general rule the more that these parts are simplified the better that the whole will work. Regardless of what we do, each layer of complexity, each added feature and each point of contact all create more and more things that can lead to errors, generate miscommunication and break down.

A practical example of the value of simplicity can be provided from the martial arts. Facing an adversary in a situation where the outcome is uncertain, winning or losing often hangs on the thread of split second reactions to someone’s movements, hesitation or even breathing rhythm. The more that extraneous thoughts and movements can be eliminated, the greater the chance of victory. The restraints of form are thus whittled and whittled away until the only thing that remains is thoughtless observation and reaction.

Simplicity is also attractive because of its economic impact. The more complicated something is the more it tends to cost to build, install, maintain and, when it breaks down, replace. These costs are often not solely absorbed by one party but rather shared with other parties or the economic system as a whole. This in turn creates inflationary pressure and different types of price increases that can become difficult to reverse.

Apart from reduced direct economic costs, simplicity creates space and space can be used to create a great amount of economic value. As Lao Zi said in the Dao De Jing, it is the inner empty space not its outer form where its true benefit lies. We are the masters of space but servants of form.

Shape clay into a vessel; it is the space within that makes it useful.

Dao De Jing

Sources of Complexity

Despite the allure and benefits of simplicity, there are several reasons why it can be hard to escape excessive complexity in practice:

• The law of accumulation. One of the basic laws of life seems to be that the greater amount of time that passes the more things tend to accumulate: more items in the garage; more books on the shelves; more papers on the desk. Each of these items occupies physical and mind space, creates clutter and seemingly acquiring a life of its own interacts with its surroundings, creating additional complexity. The larger the system, the greater amount of complexity that is often created.
• The economic efficiency of inefficiency. Another reason why complexity often thrives is that inefficiency generates its own efficiencies: many people profit from things working worse or taking longer than they should. If three people are hired for a job it takes two people to do it creates clear economic inefficiencies but it also provides a salary for worker #3 that will be spent, generating positive economic consequences. Of course this cannot be sustained forever but these types of inefficiencies can often last long enough to prevent excessive forms of complexity from being dismantled.
• The sum of all disagreements. People often have different view points and so any system of significant size invariably reflects a range of perspectives and compromises. The result of this is something that may might not work well but is acceptable to a large number of people. The wide level of support that was required to create an inefficient system often is a very powerful defense to its being simplified.
• Hedge against uncertainty. Simplicity often requires adopting one course of action and rejecting many others. Given that the future is uncertain and the probablity of success of a single course of action cannot be calculated exactly, at times people will view a multiplicity of options as a drawback in the present but an insurance policy against a wide range of possible futures.
• The mirror of our thoughts. Our minds are very powerful and have the ability to generate a constant stream of thoughts of incredible complexity. While these thoughts can be the source of new ideas and solutions they can create a crowded inner landscape which causes us to see or create great complexity in our outer world as well.

Conclusion

Despite its great power and allure, simplicity remains difficult to implement in practice. This is not in many cases due to strong opposition to the concept of simplicity in the abstract but rather the fact that life is a moving river; we move from simplicity to complexity to simplicity once again as we travel forward develping new ideas, setting new projects in motion, discovering things to be improved and starting once again. In this sense simplicity and complexity are two sides of a constantly turning coin.

Yet perhaps there is reason to believe that at the end of the river the coin will stop turning and simplicity will at long last triumph over the great force of complexity. We as humans have a great drive to understand who and where we are and this has inspired us throughout the ages to search through the layers of the unknown and arrive at the essence of what really exists. At each step of the journey when we stop and look back we often find that the truth is far simpler that what we imagined or feared. The irony of humanity’s constant explorations, outward and inward, across seas of complexity, may well turn out to be that what was thought to be far away has always been close and what was thought to be outside has always been inside.