It’s Complicated

If I were only allowed one phrase I could use in every discussion, of any kind, it would be “It’s complicated.” For anything from politics to the weather, things always turn out to be more complicated than people think.

Of course, no one wants it to be that way. As human beings, we naturally crave simple solutions. A is because of B. The solution to X is Y. Done. Let’s go get a sandwich.

But it never turns out to be that simple. It’s always that only some people believe A is because of B. Other feel that B is because of A. Yet others are convinced that A is because of C. And then the people who study A for a living will tell you that all of the above are true, to varying degrees, in a very complicated arrangement of causalities and correlations ... and by the time they’re finished talking about it, your mind has already wandered off to that sandwich.

But reality doesn’t seem to be complex enough for us – we seem determined to make our lives more and more complicated. Every time there’s a problem, our solution is to pile another level of complexity on top of it.

My favorite example of this is health insurance. It starts with just “I pay you to cover my health expenses.” Seems simple, right? But then you factor in copays and deductibles and coinsurance and etc., etc. and I end up not knowing if I'm getting a good deal or not. And how am I going to pay for what it doesn’t cover? Well, you could do a Flexible Spending Account. Or a Health Savings Account. They’re different because … mmm … sandwich …

And let's not even get into what's covered by your plan, and what isn't -- in the end, health care becomes a rare product that you really need, but you don't really know what you're paying or what you're getting.

With something like health insurance, it’s impossible to not eventually feel lost and confused. We feel like we’re not in control, and worse, we feel stupid. There’s no worse fate in modern life that being stupid. You can’t ridicule people with physical disabilities, and rightly so, but there’s never any sympathy for the ignorant. So we’re always secretly terrified of being ignorant, and become especially anxious when we feel out of our depth. Add to that the potential consequences of getting it wrong, and health insurance is just a minefield of anxiety.

I think this is a big reason why people hate the recent Affordable Care Act despite not really knowing what's in it. We already feel like we barely have a grip on our health insurance situation, and now you’re going to pile a whole set of new complexities on top of it all? With such a touchy subject, we immediately assume the worst. The ACA's advocates say what advocates of new ideas always say, that if we could just do a better job of communicating our message, people would understand how this new layer of complexities solves their problems.

But they’re assuming that human beings have limitless ability for knowledge and attention. I’m starting to doubt that’s true. I’m worried our modern lives are starting to hit some sort of event horizon, some limit of how much we can stuff into our brains while still doing our jobs, raising our kids, and generally trying to get through the day. There just isn’t enough time and energy to understand it all.

So how do we solve this? How do we cut down on all the complexity? I suppose we could all be Thoreau and retire to Walden Pond. But then what would happen if we got sick? You can’t pay a doctor in homegrown peas. As romantic a vision as it might seem, that’s just not our world, and I think most of us still want to live in mainstream society.

I suppose we could let loose number of think tanks on the problem of our overly complex lives. They’d each come up with a number of possible solutions.  Then politicians would take up some of the ideas and fight over them. Maybe eventually some would be enacted into laws.

But then the constitutionality of those laws would be challenged in court. And even the court cases would resolve nothing, only entrenching the various sides against each other. Then the laws would be continually amended each time a new party was in power …

Sigh … I don’t know, it’s complicated.