Must a Complicated Life be Complex?

They are not the same

A movie scene…

The man asks the woman: “Do you love me?”

The woman replies: “It’s complicated.”

The chances are she means to say “It’s complex.”

They are not the same.

We live complicated lives. Many commitments. Responsibilities. Promises. Timelines. Calendars and deadlines.

But does all that necessarily add up to a complex life?

And as a corollary, would we have a better and happier life if we realized the difference between “complicated” and “complex” and acted accordingly?

The Difference

The way I define them, something complicated has many parts intricately combined. It takes a lot of effort to understand a complicated object or process. You have to invest your time, energy, and perhaps even your money to understand what is complicated.

Complexity is similar to complicatedness with one important distinction: Even though it’s hard, we can eventually understand what is complicated if we work on it long enough. But if something is complex, there’s no guarantee that we might ever understand it fully.

Saying something is “complex” usually means “I have no idea what’s going on here.” It’s ignorance with a sexy label.

Emergent Properties 

Some “emergent properties,” for example, which confront scientists, may never be understood. They are complex. 

For example, even though all cells are made of chemical elements, there is an organizational threshold over which “life” emerges. At one point the heart of a fetus starts to beat. All of a sudden what was previously a collection of chemicals becomes a living cell. 

But if you collect all the cell chemicals, throw them in a tube, and shake it, it’ll never become a living cell. “Organic Life” is an emergent property of inorganic chemicals.

On the other hand…

A Skyscraper

A skyscraper is a complicated building but it’s not complex. It has (almost) countless vertical and diagonal beams, curtain walls, cavities, facades, stories, etc. 

I don’t understand how a skyscraper is built and how it works. 

But if I took the time to become an architect or a civil engineer and worked decades on different skyscraper construction projects as an intern, an engineer, a supervisor, a project manager, etc. I’m sure I would understand how a skyscraper is “possible.” There would be no mystery or mystifying “emergent properties” to block my comprehension. 

Every complicated object or process can be understood fully with enough intellectual investment in it. 

“Complex” is a picture out of focus. We can almost tell what’s there but can never be sure of it. We may never understand it.

Whereas “complicated” is an algorithm or a flowchart. Even if it’s a million pages long, in principle we can follow it to its end. We can understand it.

The Complexity of Estrangement

I’ve been estranged for years from someone I love dearly. 

Estrangement is not complicated; it’s complex, and so is love.

I don’t know where to begin to undo this tough emotional knot. 

Sometimes I see a strand that gives me hope to unravel the ball of yarn. But when I pull on it, a new level of complexity and a new knot emerges before me, where I slide one more time from understanding back to not understanding what’s going on.

If I only knew which sequence of steps to take, I would, regardless of how many steps are involved. But complexity is like forcing a weather change over a city at a given time, counting the number of sand particles in the world, or understanding the UFOs — one doesn’t know where to begin and how to proceed.

I’m trying to break down complex issues into complicated ones. That’s my new algorithm for contentment and progress in life. It’s not always possible. Yet, it’s still the best formula I found so far.

(Illustration © Ugur Akinci)