Filtering Stuff Out To Keep It Simple

Life's not complicated... we are. That's why this newsletter was so complicated. We're going to start keeping it simple.

Hey Zedites,

Life may be unfair, uncertain, haphazard, rollercoaster-y and even fragile at times but it’s far from complicated.

If you’re outworking your peer but are constantly overlooked during promotion, that’s life being unfair. If you’re leaving your job to start your own thing without having a concrete plan in place, that’s life being uncertain. If all the problems you envisaged get dumped on you at the same time, that’s life being haphazard. If you’ve had rampant ups (happy moments) and downs (not-so happy moments) in a very short period of time, that’s life being rollercoaster-y. If you’ve recently lost a loved one, that’s life being fragile.

Life’s not complicated, it takes time for us to figure it out at times. Every new negative experience in our life puts us on edge and stresses us out until we find a solution to it. In that moment, we label life as tangled, confusing and irreparable. What we view as complication is actually all about duration—the amount of time it takes you to put two and two together and come up with a solution. More often than not, what you think is a crisis, is actually not but you need to go through a process to reach that conclusion for yourself.

Life’s as simple as you imagine it to be. The problem today, however, is the mindset. With all of the information available at our fingertips, we’ve also been led to believe that complicated is good; that if you’re not struggling, you’re not progressing, that if you’re not living each moment thinking about the next, you’re not developing, that if you’re not doing something productive every single minute of your life, you’re wasting it altogether.

And so, we’ve all been trying to complicate things so that we don’t end up either unhappy, unintelligent or unsuccessful, proving, that life is actually simple but we want to view it as being complicated for our own satisfaction.

Which is what I did for a good chunk of my life.

I’ve always had a problem with things being too simple. Maybe it was the fact that simple things didn’t yield the same amount of satisfaction that difficult things did after you’ve accomplished them, which is true in a certain sense… but that doesn’t mean everything has to be difficult for us to attain it.

Which is why I complicated the contents of this newsletter in past issues, to a point where things didn’t really make sense till you read them thrice. But complication is what I wanted, not what you wanted. Your subscription meant learning about things without having to waste 15 minutes reading a 5-min write-up.

And I get that now.

Which should also explain my two week gap. I was figuring things out.

Expect simpler, more effective and direct content moving forward.

Ciao,

Aamer