When people say they want a simpler life, what they really want is an easy life.
You want ease because you want a life less complicated, busy, and stressful without removing all the comforts. Ease is what made Amazon become a corporate Napoleon and Wag your dog’s favorite app. We want to make fewer decisions because decisions take energy. But ease and simplicity are two separate things. Simple isn’t easy. Simple takes sacrifice.
While ease is about the convenience of doing less, simplicity is actually about doing more, and doing it with self-discipline, courage, and perseverance — the ability to identify continually what you believe in, and keep at it with diligence, casting aside temptations, and possibly against the flow of everyone around you.
It means sacrificing the conveniences you’re accustomed to, like replacing mouth-watering choices with more straightforward routines. That paleo diet your friends did for a week (before jumping ship on a late-night McDonald’s run), that was a small taste of simplicity, but most people don’t have the self-discipline to plan for it so they can stick to it.
In Williams Zinsser’s book On Writing Well, he dedicated a whole chapter to what he called “the disease of American writing” — our habit of adding ̵e̵x̵t̵r̵a̵v̵a̵g̵a̵n̵t̵ ̵p̵h̵r̵a̵s̵e̵s̵ ̵a̵n̵d̵ ̵c̵o̵m̵p̵l̵e̵x̵ ̵w̵o̵r̵d̵s̵ to what we write i̵n̵ ̵o̵r̵d̵e̵r̵ ̵t̵o̵ ̵b̵l̵o̵a̵t̵ ̵i̵t̵s̵ ̵i̵m̵p̵o̵r̵t̵a̵n̵c̵e̵, when i̵n̵ ̵f̵a̵c̵t̵ editing gives your words more impact. A good writer is a good editor and will persevere until there’s nothing left to take away, not nothing more to add.
In 1984, Lee Clow tossed crumpled pieces of paper at Steve Jobs to show him the power of simplicity. Jobs could catch one paper ball easily, but in the chaos of trying to catch five at once, he missed them all, and this was enough to convince him that trying to stuff five messages into his next ad was a mistake. Risky, yes, brave, also yes. But if you really need clarity, you take risks.
Thoreau once said, “Our life is frittered away by detail… simplify, simplify.” Simplicity takes more work but has more impact. It comes from the ability to ruthlessly edit the complex. If you want to do less, better to choose the easy life, not the simple one.
This article was part of The Next Page, Chapter’s bi-monthly newsletter that reveals some of the more surprising things that make us human, and gives you a glimpse of life at Chapter.
