Simple ideas feel wise—until they stop working.
Author’s Note
Simplicity matters—especially early in recovery. Clear guidance, repeatable actions, and steady routines can be lifesaving when everything feels chaotic. This essay isn’t a rejection of that kind of simplicity.
It’s a critique of what happens when simple ideas are asked to do more than they can—when slogans replace thinking, or when comfort gets mistaken for wisdom. Many of the ideas that help us start also need to evolve if we want to keep growing.
In his woodland retreat, Henry David Thoreau famously advocated for a simpler life—an early expression of the tension between simplicity vs complexity that still defines modern thinking.The popularity of Marie Kondo’s decluttering philosophy points to the same longing: surely life can be reduced, clarified, made manageable if we just organize it properly.
I feel that pull myself every time I read an article promising “three ways to improve your life.” The implication is hard to miss: life should be simple, and if it isn’t, the problem is probably me. Add to that decades in Alcoholics Anonymous, where slogans like Keep It Simple, Stupid and all we had to do was follow a few simple rules are repeated endlessly, and the message feels almost cultural—smart people have simple lives. If yours isn’t simple, you must be doing something wrong.
That belief is seductive. It promises relief. More than that, it promises the comforting fiction that I’m in control.
When Simplicity Breaks
The trouble is that simplicity doesn’t hold up for very long.
One example that took me years to unlearn is the advice: Take care of the big things, and the little things will take care of themselves. They don’t. Taxes, bills, deadlines, forms, medications—these are all details, and ignoring them doesn’t make them disappear. It just postpones the reckoning.
Recovery slogans can suffer from the same problem. Trust God, clean house. Uncover, discover, discard. They sound profound, repeatable, and reassuring—but without the billions of how details, they eventually collapse into platitudes. Early on, they help orient you. Over time, if you’re not careful, they become verbal shortcuts that avoid the real work.
I’ve seen this dynamic everywhere, especially in business. CEOs talk confidently about KPIs and dashboards—simple metrics meant to tame complexity. Sometimes they’re useful. Other times, they’re a way to believe one’s own bullshit while ignoring what’s actually happening on the ground.
Oversimplification doesn’t just fail—it actively misleads.
Simplicity vs Complexity in Real Life
For me, complexity isn’t theoretical; it’s daily and relentless.
Living with ADHD means my mind is constantly spinning—internally and externally—drawn to shiny objects, ideas, distractions. When things compress under deadlines or competing demands, overwhelm isn’t occasional; it’s structural. Something as ordinary as packing for a trip can become exhausting: deciding what to bring, finding where things are, choosing between multiple “best” options, all while knowing that one forgotten item—a charger, a battery—can cascade into frustration.
In those moments, simplicity becomes intoxicating. It offers the illusion that everything is under control. But that illusion is precisely what makes it dangerous. When overwhelmed, the temptation isn’t just to simplify—it’s to give up.
Intellectual Comfort Food
This is where simplicity turns into what I think of as intellectual comfort food.
Ideas like change your thinking, change your life or we attract what we think about once appealed to me deeply. They’re neat. They’re optimistic. And they’re mostly nonsense. The world doesn’t bend to our thoughts, and believing it does often leads to self-blame when reality refuses to cooperate.
Ironically, recovery offered a better corrective than self-help culture. The Serenity Prayer—especially change the things we can—acknowledges complexity without pretending to master it. It quietly admits that much of life isn’t under our control, and that wisdom lies in knowing the difference.
One of my clearest warning signs that an idea is oversimplifying reality? Popularity. When I hear phrases like It is what it is, I don’t hear wisdom anymore. I hear someone trying to end a conversation. I used to think those phrases meant something profound. Now they mostly remind me how badly I once wanted easy answers.
Cognitive Limits—and Working With Them
There’s a real reason simplicity appeals to us. Miller’s Law suggests we can only hold a limited number of things in mind at once. That’s not a character flaw; it’s a cognitive fact.
But the answer isn’t pretending complexity doesn’t exist—it’s building systems that can hold it for us.
Over time, I’ve learned that managing complexity requires an individualized process, not universal rules. My own looks like this: short daily meditation, regular exercise, morning pages, social connection, more movement. I travel with tools—journal, notebook, phone—and increasingly use AI to research ideas as they arise. I assume complexity will show up, and I plan for it.
The key insight is expectation. When something comes up, I don’t need to solve it immediately. I can jot it down. Research it later. Write about it tomorrow. Some ideas take weeks—or years—of circling back because they’re genuinely complex.
Lists help. Crossing things off feels good. But experience has taught me that tomorrow always brings a new list with different priorities, whether today’s is finished or not. The illusion of mastery is tempting; the reality of ongoing adjustment is unavoidable.
The New Simplicity
So what does embracing complexity actually look like?
It means developing a process that works for you, not adopting someone else’s rules. It means learning to spot hot takes and dismiss them quickly. It means asking, How exactly would that work? and not being embarrassed by the question.
It also means redefining success. For someone with ADHD, finishing things matters more than polishing them endlessly. Good enough really is better than never ready. Perfectionism is just another form of avoidance dressed up as standards.
Maturity has taught me something else too: there’s real calm in knowing—not just saying—that I will never know it all. Expecting to be baffled isn’t a failure; it’s honest. Being wrong—or more accurately, mistaken—isn’t weakness. It’s how learning actually happens. Asking smart questions of people who know more than you is usually welcomed, though it’s astonishing how few people do it.
Beyond Simplicity
Here’s the blunt truth: you don’t have to be a genius to get smarter. You just need to be a little more skeptical and a little more curious about simple answers.
To anyone aggressively chasing simplicity, my response is straightforward: Let me know how that works out for you in ten years.
Simplicity isn’t wrong—it’s incomplete. When it becomes a substitute for thinking, it turns from a tool into a liability. The real work now isn’t to make life simpler, but to become the kind of person capable of holding more of it without lying to themselves.
That’s the new simplicity—and it requires us to grow into thoughtful, complex human beings.
I’ve explored similar ideas about clarity and honesty in recovery in Why I Go to AA. Philosophical tools like Occam’s Razor are often misunderstood as mandates for simplicity rather than guides for careful thinking.
