Imprecision in Thought Part 4 Comfort, Complexity, and the Stories We Tell Ourselves

Introduction

In the last post, we walked through how thinking breaks—how overusing shortcuts, collapsing distinctions, and grabbing onto explanations that are a little too clean pulls us away from reality while giving us the comforting sense that we’ve finally made sense of it.

None of that is particularly mysterious once you see it.

What’s more interesting—and a hell of a lot more relevant—is why we keep doing it.

Because this isn’t just a failure of thinking.

It’s a preference.

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Comfort Is Doing More Work Than You Think

We like to think of ourselves as rational actors, weighing evidence, updating our beliefs, and adjusting course as new information comes in.

That’s a nice story.

The more honest version is that we have a strong and very predictable tendency to shape reality into something that feels manageable—something we can tolerate, explain, and, if we’re being completely honest, avoid.

Sometimes that shows up as oversimplification.

We take something that is genuinely complex—multi-variable, context-dependent, full of tradeoffs—and compress it into something cleaner, more linear, easier to explain and defend. Single-factor explanations live here. So do most ideological frameworks once they get stretched just a little too far past their useful range.

It feels like clarity, but it’s often distortion.

But there’s another move, and it’s just as common.

We take things that are actually simple—and we make them more complex than they need to be. Not because they’re hard to understand. Because they’re hard to do.

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When Simple Isn’t Easy (And Complex Isn’t Hard)

I wrote about this a while back using a simple 2×2—simple vs. complex on one axis, easy vs. difficult on the other.

It sounds almost too basic to be useful…right up until you start applying it.

Some things are simple and easy. Walking. Eating. Turning on the TV.

Some things are complex but easy—once you’ve built enough experience, you can drive a car, follow a complicated protocol, or work through a chess position without much strain.

But the quadrant that causes the most trouble—the one people reliably try to escape—is simple and difficult.

Training consistently. Having the conversation you’ve been avoiding. Doing the unglamorous work required to get better at something that matters. Reading that source that you disagree with. 

There’s nothing particularly complicated about what needs to be done.

It’s just hard, and that’s where things start to go sideways. Because instead of accepting that something is simple but difficult, we start looking for a way to reinterpret it as easy and complex.

There must be a better method. A missing variable. A more sophisticated framework that, once understood, will make the whole thing easier. There usually isn’t, and the work remains.

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The Inversion: Complicating to Avoid

So, if it’s possible to oversimplify complex systems, what happens if we invert this pattern?

We complicate simple problems—not to understand them better, but to avoid the implications of understanding them clearly.

Because once something is clearly simple and difficult, the path forward becomes equally clear.

And if the path forward is clear, then the remaining variable is whether or not you’re willing to do what’s required.

That’s a much less comfortable place to be, and so we instead stay in analysis mode.

We refine the model. We debate edge cases. We search for nuance that doesn’t materially change the required action. We convince ourselves that we’re being thoughtful, careful, thorough.

And sometimes we are. But often, we’re just buying time, and trading accuracy for comfort.

And because the process feels intellectual—because it involves thinking, reading, discussing—it’s very easy to convince ourselves that we are making progress when we’re actually avoiding movement.

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Uncertainty and the Pull of the Familiar

Underneath this is something even more basic. Uncertainty gives us the willies. 

Incomplete information feels unstable. Outcomes we can’t predict feel risky. Situations where we don’t fully understand the variables create a kind of cognitive tension that we’re wired to resolve. So we reach for what feels stable.

Sometimes that shows up as clinging to what already exists, whether it holds up under scrutiny or not. Sometimes it shows up as chasing change for its own sake—anything that breaks the current discomfort feels like progress, whether it actually is or not.

Different directions. Same underlying driver. Reduce uncertainty. Regain control. Eliminate ambiguity.

And one of the fastest ways to do that is to distort reality enough so that it becomes easier to live with.

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The Skill Problem We Don’t Like to Admit

Sometimes the issue is practical rather than philosophical.

We don’t yet have the experience or skill to recognize when a heuristic is helping us—and when it’s quietly leading us off course.

When you’re early in learning something, everything looks complex. You don’t yet know what matters, what can be ignored, what patterns are real, and which ones are noise.

So you naturally reach for structure. But as you gain experience, your comfort with uncertainty and nuance increases. You start to see where the shortcuts apply—and where they don’t. Where a rule of thumb is useful, and where it becomes a trap. Without that shift, you end up applying the same tool to every problem. And now you’re not simplifying reality.

You’re distorting it.

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Tradition, Innovation, and the Same Old Shortcut

You see this same pattern show up in what looks, at first glance, like a completely different argument—the tension between tradition and innovation.

On one side, you have people looking backward and pointing to structures, norms, and ideas that have persisted over time. On the other, you have people looking forward and identifying flaws in those same structures—things that deserve to be changed, updated, or discarded. Both sides are operating off heuristics.

Tradition is a heuristic. It is accumulated experience—what has survived long enough to be passed on. Innovation is also a heuristic. It is an attempt to correct, refine, or improve based on perceived shortcomings in what came before.

Neither is inherently correct, or inherently flawed.

They are tools, and like other tools, they can be used well, or badly.

The failure mode is not preferring one over the other. The failure mode is collapsing them into identities.

“Traditionalist” becomes synonymous with “reactionary.”
“Innovative” or “progressive” becomes synonymous with “radical.”

And now you are no longer evaluating ideas, you are focusing on the people communicating them.

At that point, the shortcut has fully taken over. The label does the work for you. Once someone has been placed into a category, their argument can be accepted or dismissed without ever being examined on its own merits.

That is not analysis; it’s an ad hominem shortcut dressed up as judgment.

And it serves the same purpose of the other shortcuts we’ve been talking about—it allows you to avoid the harder work of actually engaging with the claim.

Because the reality, again, is messier.

Some traditions encode hard-earned knowledge that still holds up under scrutiny. Others persist long after they have outlived their usefulness. Some innovations solve real problems. Others create new ones while claiming to fix the old.

If you refuse to examine something because it is “old,” you throw away signal with the noise.

If you refuse to examine something because it is “new,” you preserve noise with the signal.

Same error, different direction.

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Where This Lands

There’s a version of this realization that shows up across very different traditions, which should at least make you pause for a moment.

Different language. Different eras. Same conclusion.

You don’t get to fix the world, your organization, your community, or your family first.

One version of this comes from a 19th-century rabbi who described spending his early life trying to change the world, then narrowing his focus step by step until he realized—late—that the thing he really had control over was himself. With the uncomfortable implication that had he started there, everything else might have shifted downstream.

Gandhi arrives at something similar from a different angle—the idea that the patterns you see in the world are not separate from you, and that changing yourself isn’t a retreat from responsibility, it’s a more honest engagement with it.

The Jesuit tradition frames it more actively—less contemplation, more execution—the idea of setting the world on fire not through grand abstraction, but through disciplined, local, individual action in service of others.

Different traditions, same constraint.

And if that feels a little too neat, you can add the Stoics to the list: Different culture. Different time. Same idea.

Focus on what you can control. Let go of what you can’t. Do the work in front of you. Stop trying to reorganize the world before you’ve sorted out your own thinking and behavior.

At some point, when the same idea keeps showing up across different cultures, centuries, and philosophical systems, you can either assume everyone was equally misguided…

…or consider that they may have been noticing something you’re now ignoring.

Not because it’s old. Not because it’s been repeated. But because it has survived.

And survival—intellectually, culturally, behaviorally—usually implies that something about it works well enough, often enough, to keep being rediscovered.

That doesn’t make it beyond critique.

It does make it worth examining before dismissing. And regardless, the component you have a  real hope of controlling is you. Go talk to that person you don’t agree with. Engage with the source you are suspicious of. You might be right…but do the work (on yourself, and in examining the argument and info). 

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Closing

The patterns we’ve been talking about in this series aren’t solely intellectual errors, they’re human tendencies.

We simplify what is complex so we can feel like we understand it, and we complicate what is simple so we can avoid doing it.

We reach for certainty when uncertainty feels uncomfortable, and we cling to explanations that feel sufficient even when they aren’t.

This makes you a beautiful individual snowflake…like everyone else. 

But it also means that thinking clearly—actually engaging with reality as it is, not as we’d prefer it to be—isn’t automatic.

It’s a discipline.

And like any discipline, it starts in the one place you don’t get to outsource.