Sometimes we get so desperate for things to be simple we’ll accept anything.
We would all rather have the obstacles in our lives be simple and easy to overcome. Simple means fewer unknowns and swifter resolutions. It is a natural impulse to prefer simple and easy to complicated and hard. Unfortunately, anything in life of genuine worth and value will come with challenges and complications.
At our very core human behavior is not all that complicated. Our primary drive is to move away from pain and towards pleasure, in that order. It’s not difficult to trace pretty much any human activity at the individual or global scale back to this primal drive. The trouble is, each of us is not singularly alone on this planet. There are several billion other people also moving away from pain and towards pleasure. Since our definitions and interpretations of what constitutes pain and pleasure can vary enormously this inevitably leads to conflicts and collisions between differing executions of the same primal impulse.
Wanting things to be simple is not a character flaw. It is a purely natural impulse based in our survival reflex. If something is simple we feel confident in our ability to deal with it, to overcome the potential risk of danger and keep ourselves safe. If things grow too complex they become confusing, bringing more potential dangers than we may be able to…