Favouring Simplicity

Neil Armstrong touched the moon before Sadow put wheels on luggage.

Neil Armstrong touched the moon three years before Sadow put wheels on luggage.

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Hello there, it’s Friday. I am wishing you a curious Friday. But just in case you need intellectual spice, today’s essay is just for you. Please subscribe below.

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Some things I know and want to share are quite difficult to put in words. Not because I don’t have the words for them. But because the idea itself is either so radical or so boring that the mainstream idea will either outshine it or swallow it up due to its unpopularity. Some ideas are not emotionally stirring enough.

For instance, how do you want to, in a few words, negate the idea that good education is the key to growing the economy – with the reverse that it is the growing economy that provides good education?

Nigeria is an example. When the nation churned out fewer university degrees, education was cheaper, the economy better, and jobs were guaranteed. As the linear model – the theory that better education necessitates a better economy – became more popular, people read the causality in reverse, university degrees became hotcakes, and the economy went to shit.

But that is just one example.

Another example is how we conceptualise things wrongly because we prefer dramatic effects, invigorating motions, and emotionally-stirring subjects to banal, boring, and invisible ones. Consider the word “technology.” When I mention technology to provoke an image, I am certain that you will miss items like the abacus, chariots, glass cups, sandals, spoons, books, and pens. Instead, you will have objects like computers, cars, jets, missiles, nuclear weapons, lathe machines, concrete mixers, and sophisticated hordes. This enchantment for sophisticated things and methods swallows up the simple and unsophisticated ones. No wonder we fall for sophisticated scams but scorn legitimate but boring ones. It feels like masochism of sorts; no wonder, the good ol’ missionary coital position is branded by some entities as “vanilla sex.” The more sophisticated, the better; or so we think.

To cap it all, Neil Armstrong touched the moon three years before Sadow put wheels on luggage. This speaks not to a lack of imagination but to defective imagination – which slices out the boring and simple because it is not enchanting enough. (Imagination is meant to be exciting). Imagine what it took man to put Neil on the moon but we had to haul heavy luggage for distance. Yet, the wheels on luggage help your lifespan more than the moon mission. What have you ignored?

My call this weekend: look at what your brain ignores as boring, common, simple, unsophisticated, even irrelevant, and truly examine what information it has to give you. A clue: the simple and boring tends to outlast the overly sophisticated. Have a great weekend.