Deliberate complication, the choice of a deliberately ornate language — or exaggeration, simplification, cutting off the superfluous, as a result of which the very essence suffers? The psychotherapist Irina Mlodik discusses these two facets of the presentation of thoughts.
I love simplicity like no one else. Maybe I’m not smart enough or I don’t really like the process of intense thinking.
I get lost in the excessively complicated, I begin to seem stupid to myself: I have to stray in the forest of words and concepts. Very quickly I lose my bearings, I don’t see, I can’t find the main idea, which seems to me a treasure carefully hidden by insidious pirates. More often than not, I am unable or simply unwilling to undertake this quest to find the essence. I do not like to wade through the jungle of a language that is deliberately complicated, although I understand that any field of activity creates its own conceptual apparatus, uses its own terms, ingrained phrases and clichés.
Sometimes one gets the feeling that even the writer does not have a minimally clear picture. Then we, together with him, are forced to wander through the haze of his confusion, trying to catch the elusive essence of what he wanted to express. We wander, wander, at some point it seems that it will clear up now, but no — the key thought is still dissolved in the next cascade of reflections and arguments. In this case, I would not at all humanistically want to offer the author to do this work himself, without inviting me into it. The feeling of such work is painful and bleak: to make an ornate path along someone’s reasoning without finding a treasure.
Other texts seem to be created in order to create the appearance of expertise and depth of thought. The understandable desire of other authors to seem smart does not evoke a response in me. For some, scientific speech creates the illusion of a stream of smart thoughts, but I don’t like visibility, I prefer authenticity as it is. Once I had to translate the essence of my research into the language required and accepted in dissertations. It was very painful. If you do the reverse work: translate a hundred of those pages from pseudoscientific to human, the essence will take only a few paragraphs and will be clear to everyone. I am sure that with a clear picture in my head, certain efforts and assumptions, even very complex things can be expressed in simple words without losing depth.
The absence of unnecessary information allows you to see the whole picture and determine the direction
But I don’t like intentional simplifications either, the phrases “be simpler, there’s nothing to bother”, “yes, everything is simple, why fence the garden”, “be simpler, and people will reach out to you” jar me. I wondered why I was so annoyed by the very simplicity, which, as the people say, is “worse than theft”? And why, in fact, is it worse than stealing? Theft is an attempt to take something that belongs to us, a manipulation of our trust, a violation of our right to possess. Deliberate simplification is thus somewhat like stealing.
What is stealing? I suppose the scale and scope of any subjective phenomenon. Human subjectivity and the psyche are multi-valued, contradictory and paradoxical. Attempts to deliberately simplify them reduce the volume to a plane, a straight line, and even a point: a simple conclusion, conclusion, decision, advice. This can be done only by cutting off the remaining parts that do not fit into the flat output. Thus, for someone, the complexity of someone else’s human experience, reflection, sensation becomes invaluable.
Who and when really needs it to be easier? The first thing that is immediately born in response to this question: children!
The child’s psyche is not yet able to perceive ambiguity and volume. The child most often needs simple answers: “Is he good or bad?” An adult can already assume that it is impossible to answer this question unequivocally, the hero of a story or a film is at the same time confused, suffering, in a temporary crisis, acting in accordance with the movements of his soul or in accordance with difficult circumstances. But the child is most often not interested in knowing this, and it is unnecessary. Therefore, in fairy tales, Baba Yaga or Kashchei look like unequivocally “bad” characters, Alyonushki and Ivanushki of different stripes look like “good” ones. It is easier for a child to split a complex phenomenon and place it in different people, including a “good” mom and a “bad” dad. And sometimes even one mother is perceived as different subjects: a kind mother and a mother-witch.
So, children understand the language of simplification and at a certain stage of development they need it if we want the child to understand us.
Sometimes simplification is needed for certain tasks. For example, we know: the map is not equal to the territory. A map is a diagram, a flat, simplified vision of a territory that allows you to orient yourself. The absence of unnecessary information allows you to see the whole picture and determine the direction.
A diagnosis is also a kind of «map», a simplification that allows you to reduce everything that happens to a person to the name of a disease or syndrome for a specific purpose — the appointment of treatment.
It is often difficult to communicate with excessively meticulous people who are not capable of simplification.
Even just naming is a simplification. When we say «chair», «spring», «pain», «love», we simplify, implying some specific object, feeling or phenomenon, our subjective idea of it. Simplification allows us to operate, to contact, to communicate. “Spring is on the street”, “I love you”, “we bought new chairs”. If we have not simplified, then it is often difficult to understand us.
If in communication we describe for a long time each phenomenon and object, attaching a detailed description of the subjective idea of it, we will be considered boring. On the other hand, if we never even imply that «love» or «chair» means something different for everyone, we will deliberately simplify the situation by reducing everything to our projection. That is, he said “I love”, and we seemed to quickly understand what he was talking about, replacing his idea with our “I love”.
Therefore, it seems to me that it is often difficult to communicate with excessively meticulous (most often very intellectually developed) people who are not capable of simplification, it is impossible to quickly clarify something with them, cutting off unnecessary and unnecessary information at the moment. They are not always able to grasp the context, understand when to simplify, and when to accept ambiguity and volume. It can get boring with them, and not because they are talking nonsense, but because they cannot highlight the main thing based on the context.
And with those who have already grown up, matured, but are not able to see phenomena in their complexity and inconsistency, it can also be boring, because they quickly polarize any phenomenon, reducing it to “right” or “wrong”, conditionally “good” or «bad». They usually have quick and unambiguous answers, conclusions, solutions for everything. At the same time, it is precisely such hasty conclusions that they like to announce with arrogance and pressure that surprises me.
It is not at all banal, in my opinion, the task is to choose how to use this ability of thinking in ordinary communication. When it is worth reducing to something simple, modeling and schematizing, and when — implying and discussing the complexity, versatility and inconsistency of the structure of the world. In this we will be helped by our ability to understand the external context, to realize goals and objectives, to switch from simple to complex and vice versa.