‘You are young, enjoy it until you can. It will never be better,’ is something parents tell you, but they don’t explain why that should be the case. The answer has to do with the word complicated.
Things get in the way and life gets complicated. We all know this feeling when we’re kind of lost and overwhelmed by what life has prepared for us. What do we mean when we say: ‘Things get complicated‘? The common explanation is that things are difficult.
This may be true, but it doesn’t explain why things are generally simpler when we’re kids. Firstly, we know much less about the world and don’t understand our existence so deeply. Our mental map of all possible outcomes – difficulties, dangers, pitfalls, and so on – is limited. We’re free minds living in the moment.
What changes with age isn’t only our mental map with more experiences but our life situation, too. I will call it positioning. Positioning means that we’re aware of the position we are in and what pieces on the chessboard we can and need to move to change our position, shaping our future. The difficulty comes with the fact we’re not alone in the chess game.
You want to do X but your partner feels like Y. You’d like to take a new job abroad but have a mortgage and your wife is unsure. You have two children, one has entered primary school, and our wife worries about the health of her parents.
Life is like a stream of water meandering through the vast landscape of options. When we encounter a challenging environment, it gravitates into pits to seep through. In the end, it always finds a way to keep moving. Sometimes, we can adapt depending on the situation, but other times it feels like we’re dragged into situations we didn’t choose. What we have control over is our positioning— the people we let ourselves surround with, the work we do, the country we live in, the proximity to our loved ones, the work-life balance, the number of children to throw into this complicated world.
With every new interaction and decision we make, there is a change that our weave of life will get tangled up. People are different, and their approaches to life are as well. Some too often anticipate the worst and get tangled up in their thoughts before taking action; the temper ones take action immediately and then start thinking about how to clean up the mess. Or, others don’t even bother to clean up the mess.
Life gets complicated by nature as we grow older. It’s not just us on the playground, Mum, Dad, and our grandparents. Adult life consists of more moving parts, more relationships. Once too many aspects of our lives get intertwined so that one decision impacts other decisions or people, it is when you realise that life is complicated, and our parents were right that youth is the most joyful, but nobody ever told us why. We all know what simple living means; however, the opposite becomes less clear.
Making things simple can be hard. It is like writing an article. It is easier to spit everything that’s on our mind onto the page instead of refining the text by subtracting. It is sometimes easier to make a complicated choice than a simple one.
My sense is that people start overcomplicating when their rational is in charge. They get lost in the noise of the logic instead of listening to their feelings. Yesterday, I decided to go to Rotterdam, taking two hours to get there, to buy a new notebook. I used to live there and know the best place to get the one I want. I could have gone to Amsterdam, which is much closer, but it felt complicated. I chose the simple, illogical solution.
Making conscious decisions based on our feelings is the way to go, and when things get complicated, complex, or difficult, do yourself a favour and untangle some unnecessary pieces of from time to time.