It seems to me that there are many things in life which have become significantly more complex than an outside observer would have any reason to expect. Here are a few -
Food. How is this a thing? How do thousands of people in a range of professions - from marketing to engineer to chemist - dedicate their entire professional lives to this?
Sex. The staggering variety of physical, emotional, legal, political, and social issues surrounding an activity of such essential simplicity. Well, it’s amazing.
Religion. You’d think this would be pretty straight forward. Either there is a God (or Gods) or there isn’t. If there is one (or more), there would be, you know, some sort of consistent guidelines or experiences or activities or whatever. But… once again, there are thousands of people who spend their entire adult lives trying to make sense of the whole mess without much seeming progress being made.
Anyway, that’s my list. If you can think of more or if you’d care to pontificate on how or why things came to be like this, I would love to hear about it.
Speaking as a store cashier: Shopping should be simple. You find the items you want, make sure you have a way to pay for them, bring them to the register, let the cashier ring them up and pay for them.
Yet people either bring items they don’t want to the register or don’t have a way to pay for them, or have to go back for the items they forgot, or dump things on the register, etc. etc. etc.
I’m diametrically opposite of the OP’s impression that these three things are simple and that we humans have made them unexpectedly complicated. That short list hits three of the most centrally important facets of our existence* and so it makes sense to me that our complexity-encompassing minds would obsess in those directions, paying vast attention to granular details and to elaborated considerations of their implications in every remote crevice of life. If not these things, what else?
Yeah, I know that for many atheists an obsession with religion probably makes scarcely more sense than an obsession with laundry lint or lichen genotype variations or something. But think in the larger terms of “philosophy, religion, overarching belief systems, and the ilk”, which would include the general vantage point of scientific inquiry as an approach to understanding life.
I don’t think any of those are things which “should” be simple.
Take food.
Suppose we’re talking about hunter/gatherers: Knowing which of thousands of species in any given region were edible raw, which were edible only if cooked in certain fashions, which were edible at certain stages of growth and how to recognize ripeness, which plant species would be ripe in which location at which times of year, how to catch animal species without getting injured or killed, how to make the tools to do all of this, how and where to find the materials for those tools – that is not remotely simple.
Suppose we’re talking about farmers: most were also doing some hunting and gathering, so there’s at least some aspects of the above; plus all the huge number of things that it’s necessary to know about livestock care and about seeding, cultivation, saving and storing seed; and of course the tools for all of that.
We now have a huge, complicated, and fragile food production and delivery system whose result is that most people know nothing about it except that they can take the paycheck from their job and go into the grocery store or a restaurant and buy what they want. But the lack of knowledge doesn’t mean that the system is simple.
I thought this was going to me more like, paper towel dispensers with frikkin’ lasers on them. Toilets with automatic flush that activate if you move a micron. That kind of thing.
Or my pet peeve, cars these days. Way over-complicated. I drive lots of rental cars in my job, and it’s gotten that it takes several minutes of familiarization to figure each one out. Might be fine if you owned it, but there’s no standardization. This manufacturer has a traditional gear shifter, that one has a knob instead, this one has a shifter but you have to push some damn button somewhere too…
And the radios are infuriating. One time my work partner and I couldn’t figure out how to turn off the radio for five minutes. Turns out the controls for it weren’t on the radio itself, but on the pedestal below. Same thing for window controls sometimes. Stop trying to make cars unique!
Unlike a horn or a stringed instrument, there’s no special technique you have to learn just to get a sound out of it, you just press the keys.
You don’t need to learn how to produce notes and where they all are, the notes are all conveniently right in front of you, and in ascending order, even.
It should be easy but it’s incredibly hard.
I suppose it could be argued the simplicity is what allows it to be so difficult; the difficulty is mainly in the keyboard’s versatility. Playing a simple, single line melody on the keyboard is ridiculously easy, but unlike a horn or a stringed instrument, as the pianist you are not responsible for just one part of a composition, but you are potentially ALL of the parts by yourself.
Driving should be simple, because there are a fairly simple set of rules that if everyone just followed them and paid attention we’d all be fine.
But the various jackasses who can’t/won’t follow the rules and/or pay attention fuck it up for the rest of us. I daily go through 2 intersections that the local PD could make thousands of dollars a day on if they posted motorcycle cops there to do nothing but enforce the fact that you cannot legally turn left on a red light here.
Playing the piano is very rewarding quickly : with just a couple of lessons you can play some basic tunes. But it seems that there’s no end to the technical difficulties and no matter how long you’ve played and how good you are, you’ll always come across a piece that gives you serious trouble.
On the other hand, bowed string instruments are insanely difficult at the start. Never mind playing a recognizable tune, just producing an acceptable sound reliably takes years. But I’ve read that once you master this, you can tackle pretty much everything.
I play the piano but I also tried my hand at the cello. I could play some Bach, Chopin or Satie crowd-pleasers within a year and a half on the piano. However, the only thing that I ever managed to play on the cello can only charitably be described as “cow in its death throes”.
If you ever want to start an intense 30 minute, friendship-threatening debate amongst any group of people, just walk in and say, “I’m ordering pizzas. What should I get?”
When I was a foolish 20-something, I witnessed this lunacy almost weekly.
Now, as a wise 40-something, I skip the question and just order the pizza. A cheese and a pepperoni, in as many multiples as are needed to feed everyone. That’s it. You want something else, you’re on your own.
The menus, probably. But that’s a cyclical issue, and affects different restaurants at different rates.
Usually, a fast food place starts with a simple, small menu. Burgers, fries, shakes, a couple different sizes, the end. Then they expand. They add fish, they add chicken nuggets, they add combo meals, dollar value menus, etc. Then they realize all that just confuses people and they trim down the menu to only the best sellers and simplify the ordering process. Then they rinse and repeat.
But one fast food place might be in the “simple” part of this process, while others are in the “expansive and convoluted” part of the cycle. So at any given time you can choose whether you like a dazzling array of choices or a simple, straightforward menu.
Add in touchscreen ordering systems and confusion over whether your food will be brought to your table or not, and it isn’t hard to see why it is far from simple for many people.
Well, where I worked there was a sizable group of Indian contractors who were vegetarian (there were a few non-Indian vegetarians, as well), so we always made sure there was a veggie pizza option.
Income taxes in most developed countries is a matter of getting a statement that says “You owe this much tax. Here is how we figured it out. Pay this much, or do a bunch of paperwork explaining why your answer is better.” And people generally skip the hassle because the government already has the data.
America, like those other countries, has your income data. And they are going to crunch that data to come up with a figure you owe. But… they aren’t going to tell you. First you have to spend hours upon hours inputting your own hoarded scraps of data into TurboTax, then submit it by April 15th, and around August they may tell you that you got the wrong answer and you need to do it again until you get the right answer.
Fucking lunacy, ridiculous waste, and the tax prep industry is 100% to blame.
Took my kid to the local grocery store because there was a sign saying, “Hiring Now! Ask for Jonathan”.
So we track down Jonathan, and he tells us to go to ‘the website’ and fill out an application. :rolleyes: Okay.
What fucking website? This is a Smith’s, which is owned by Kroger. You go to Kroger, and there is nowhere to be found that lists anything about an application. We finally found some kind of third-party portal bullshit and struggled through the most counter-intuitive interface imaginable.
Not a single fucking job listing showing for the local location. So, what the fuck, Jonathan? Are you hiring or not? Waste of fucking time. We were standing in the goddamn store he wants a job in, why not …
In grad school I was on a group project with a very diverse group which included a Muslim guy from Jordan and a guy from India (And yes, we did in fact sometimes all walk into a bar together). Whenever we ordered pizza the Jordanian guy always insisted on ordering it from a halal place that used beef pepperoni rather than the usual pork. We were lucky that the Indian guy wasn’t a strict religious Hindu and was ok with eating beef or veggie pizza would have been about the only option.