Ben David Trigg

As I sit here going through a backlog of over 4,000 old notes I’ve accumulated across a multitude of different apps, to try to carve sense and order out of them, in order to corral them into just one app, I feel like I’m fighting the very chaos of the cosmos.

That may be a little bit of an exaggeration, but as I hinted at in earlier posts, I find myself overwhelmed when faced with all the disparity of information across my ‘system’, with loads of different apps and files that all talk to each other in different ways – or don’t talk to each other.

Both situations present problems – whether the files can be read across or shared between different apps, or not. The problem is one of complexity. Left to itself, everything tends towards chaos, towards entropy, and disorder. Part of the human project is simply to join with God in restoring order to creation – part, not all (I think there is a second part related to beauty). Sometimes it feels like restoring order is all, though. Like it’s all I can do simply to try and stay on top of the day-to-day and not let things get crazy and out of hand. Never mind having time to be creative.

Everything will fight to lure you back to complexity, if you make it your goal to strive for simplicity. You may want to tame your commitments by saying no, but once you do say no and realise you do have a bit more time, gradually the temptation to say yes more will reemerge, and soon you’ll be right back where you started. You may decide not to take work calls in the evenings – until there’s an emergency. You may decide to try to pare down the apps on your smartphone to make it into a semi-‘dumb phone’ – but the temptation will always be there to add apps back in, one by one, when you discover you may have pared things down just a bit too much. Well it *was* really useful when I could quickly glance at a spreadsheet without having to get my laptop out…

The lure towards complexity emerges in part from the cosmos’ tendency towards entropy, but it also emerges as a phenomena of capitalism. We are constantly being coaxed to increase the load on our senses, on our wallets, on our shelves and on our devices, because our economy is built on the fundamental principle of ‘more’. Make them want more so we can make more, then we’ll make more so they want more. Hence where a few years ago all we had was 5 channels of terrestrial television, now we have not only cable but also tonnes of streaming services all with different subscription prices. This is one area of our lives that has become vastly more complex over the last couple of decades. Multiply that out across banking and financial services, retail, entertainment, and workplace services. Our workplaces are riddled with inefficiencies simply because of this-and-that new service that the IT department or the board or this manager signed us up to that we now have to use, or because different teams use different services, or simply because in our old job we used the Google suite and even though in this job they use Microsoft I actually would prefer to just use Google if it’s all the same to you. Then we don’t know where to find any of our stuff.

Ad infinitum. The world, and especially late-stage capitalism, will tend more and more towards complexity.

FIGHT THE COMPLEXITY. Peace and order will only emerge when we choose simplicity as a guiding principle to our work and our lives. Simplicity is not simplistic. It is disciplined. It is focused on what matters. It chooses to say ‘no’ a lot of the time. Simplicity is wisdom. If anything, it’s allowing the complexity to breed that is simplistic.

Complexity breeds
Like so many weeds
With options, potential and choice
But simplicity’s found
With well-tended ground
A still beauty to make hearts rejoice

Ben Trigg, 2024

So, I don’t know whether I’m going to keep corralling these 4,000 notes in order to preserve them for posterity or simply hold up my hands and just delete them all, or at least perhaps archive them somewhere just in case I need them. What I will do is assess how I’m using my apps and technology and, if I find that I am allowing complexity to creep back in, I will SMASH THE COMPUTER I mean er, I will take time to rein the number of apps I use back in until it’s at the bare essentials.