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A 2,000-Year-Old Principle for Living with Clarity and Ease
The Ancient Rule That Brings Simplicity to Modern Life
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Rome, 2,000 years ago. A man stands on a stone wall and looks down at the busy market. Sellers shout. Kids run and grab figs. People yell over each other. It looks like chaos. It sounds like chaos. It probably smelled like chaos too.
But if you take away the sandals and the toga cosplay, it’s not so different from what we scroll through every single morning. The Roman crowd had traders and gossip mongers. We’ve got push notifications and group chats. They had marble walls covered in election graffiti. We have Twitter — sorry, “X.” Different outfits, same circus.
And buried in all that noise, the Romans gave us a rule so simple, so raw, that it still holds up two thousand years later. They called it the Rule of Parsimony. Most of us know it now by another name: Occam’s Razor.
“The simplest explanation is usually the best one.”
You’d think in an age of AI, billion dollar start ups, and twenty four hour news, we’d cling to something this clean. But no we’re addicted to complexity. We say things up in buzzwords, drown them in acronyms, then stand around pretending we understand.
