Why is everything so darned complicated? And I really mean everything: our taxes, schedules, bureaucracies, machines, algorithms, org charts, our school and welfare and health care systems, you name it.
Even — and I say this as an oft culpable columnist — our diction. "If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out,” George Orwell stipulated in one of his rules of writing. I’m tempted to edit him thus: If it is possible to cut a word [out], [always] cut it [out].
The simplicity Orwell yearned for is synonymous with clarity, elegance, efficiency and integrity. It’s an ideal a lot of us subscribe to in theory but keep violating in practice. A lamentable secret of the universe seems to be that it takes enormous effort to simplify, but no effort at all to do the opposite. Put differently, it’s easier to add things, even unnecessary ones, than to subtract.