Simplifying Life When it Gets Too Complex
- SU
- Jun 6
- 4 min read
Updated: 3 days ago
When life gets too complex…
When there is too much noise…
I make life as simple as possible.
Sometimes that means sleeping outside on a cot and burning a pile of branches.
As life has gotten increasingly complex…
I have started stripping existence down to its most basic components:
A patch of grass.
A place to lie down.
A small fire.
Darkness.
Time.
Humans spend a lot of energy making life more complex that it needed.
Busy being busy.
Notifications.
Meetings.
Metrics.
Deadlines.
Opinions from people you wouldn’t spend more than five minutes with by choice.
Entire industries exist to convince us that peace is one purchase, one promotion, one election, one argument, or one subscription away.
Eventually, somebody like me ends up exactly where I am now…
Sitting beside a fire.
Watching branches collapse into embers.
Staring into the moonlight.
Remembering something civilization works very hard to make us forget.
We live inside grids.
Most people think “the grid” means electricity.
Electricity is simply the most visible layer because the lights go out when it fails.
Civilization is actually composed of countless overlapping grids stacked upon one another like geological strata.
Utility grids.
Transportation grids.
Financial grids.
Information grids.
Social grids.
Power.
Water.
Fuel.
Roads.
Supply chains.
Internet.
Telecommunications.
Banking.
Education.
Healthcare.
Government.
Most of the time we don’t notice them.
We only notice them when one breaks.
Then there are the invisible grids.
“Time”, in the sense of a clock, is a grid.
(But, the readers who know me, know that I don’t believe “time” is just an atomic transition frequency of Cesium-133 Hyperfine Transition per second, or 32,768 oscillations per second of a common crystal).
I mean time in how it is measured and used to keep humans on “track”.
Modern civilization functions the way it does because billions of people agree to synchronize themselves around clocks, calendars, fiscal quarters, work schedules, school years, and deadlines.
Remove synchronized time and modern society becomes remarkably difficult to coordinate…
outside of nature…
the sun, moon, and stars.
I suspect the ancient elders of humanity understood time better than modern humans do, at least in some ways.
Money is a grid.
Not the paper itself, but the network of obligations, debt, dependency, and trust that allows resources to flow through civilization, while capturing it.
Identity is a grid.
Birth certificates.
Passports.
Licenses.
Medical records.
Tax records.
A bureaucratic map of a human being.
Yet the strange thing is that all of these systems mimic nature.
Life has been building networks for billions of years.
Watersheds.
Pollinator routes.
Mycorrhizal fungal networks.
Food webs.
Seed dispersal systems.
A bee colony is a communications network.
A forest is a resource distribution network.
A creek is a transport system for nutrients and information.
Even the soil beneath our feet is a vast exchange system connecting fungi, bacteria, roots, minerals, water, and carbon.
Life mimics life.
Civilization simply copied the blueprint.
For the past two years I’ve been quietly reconnecting myself to older grids.
Growing food.
Maintaining water.
Keeping bees.
Saving seeds.
Composting.
Heating with wood.
Not because I’m escaping civilization.
Humans rarely escape networks.
The real choice is deciding which networks deserve dependency.
The industrial grid offers efficiency.
Nature offers resilience.
Those are not the same thing.
Nature spent billions of years building redundancy.
Humanity spent a few decades building optimization.
Optimization works beautifully until something fails.
Then redundancy begins looking like wisdom of understanding fallback systems.
That is why my family farm is my primary anchor.
Not the internet.
Not social media.
Not this website.
Not my theories.
Not my writing.
Just a fire pit on my grandparents’ farm.
The simple satisfaction of turning chaos into heat and ash.
There is a reason so many of my metaphors circle back to bonfires, greenhouses, oceans, stars, and soil.
Those things existed before all the noise.
Most will exist long after it.
For all the conversations about artificial intelligence, politics, consciousness, simulations, and the future of civilization, one reality keeps presenting itself:
A human being can sleep beside a fire on a mountain and feel more sane than they do staring at a glowing rectangle engineered to capture attention.
The fire asks nothing from me accept for burnables.
The grass recommends nothing… but to be mowed before it becomes a fire hazard.
The stars do not monetize my attention, but they get most of it on a clear night.
The creek does not ask me to accept updated terms of service…
(though the government might when it comes to water rights).
Nothing is optimized.
Which is why it restores something as I restore it.
Every output requires an input.
The deeper problem with modern life isn’t just surveillance, tracking, or information overload.
Though the surveillance state and digital prison does require vasts amount of energy…
It is a thermodynamically unfavorable and energetically inefficient way to engineer a dependent compliant society.
The deeper problem is that people become so surrounded by artificial signals (noise) that they forget what their own thoughts sound like.
Every digital platform rewards engagement.
Not understanding.
Fear becomes outrage.
Outrage becomes identity.
Identity becomes tribe.
Tribe becomes ideology.
Ideology becomes reality.
Eventually people stop defending reality and begin defending their reflection of reality.
The algorithm learns the user.
The user learns the algorithm.
Each becomes a mirror for the other.
The dark irony is that humanity invented machines to save time and then handed the saved time back to the machines.
The original meaning of intelligence was never the accumulation of information.
It was discernment.
The ability to distinguish natural signal from noise.
A person can carry the entirety of human knowledge in their pocket and easily lose that ability.
A person can sit beside a fire with nothing but smoke, crickets, and silence and recover it.
Civilizations rarely collapse because they lack information.
They collapse when they can no longer distinguish information from wisdom.
Perhaps that is the real digital prison.
Not that people are watched and tracked.
But that they become so surrounded by noise that they lose access to themselves and ability to discern the truth.
The jailbreak has always been…
embarrassingly low-tech.
Walk outside.
Burn a pile of branches.
Watch the stars.
Listen to the darkness for a while.
Humanity keeps inventing increasingly sophisticated problems only to find ancient solutions.
