Simple Was the Thing I Was Building

For the last six years, I’ve been building systems. Calendars, task managers, notes, databases, automations, little pieces of software—anything that could hold some part of my life so I didn’t have to. Somewhere along the way, I think I forgot what the point was. I wasn’t trying to become a productivity person. I was trying to make my life complicated without feeling complicated. And lately something strange has been happening: I forget things. I feel like Guy Pearce in Memento. Not important things exactly. More like I’ll wake up and not immediately remember what I was working on yesterday, what I decided, or what version of myself I was occupying. And…nothing happens. My life doesn’t fall apart. The thing I decided is still there. The task comes back when it needs to. The website is still published. The message is still sent. Apparently I spent six years building systems so I could finally stop thinking about my systems.

I noticed it especially this week. I woke up one morning completely disconnected from the day before and had only the vaguest idea that maybe I should design something. A few hours later I had found an old website I’d forgotten about, redesigned it, added it to my portfolio, written about the design process, cleaned up some other things, reached out to a few people and then went to sleep. I couldn’t have planned that sequence in the morning because I didn’t know it existed yet. The day organized itself partly through contact with the day. That feels embarrassingly obvious written down, but it’s new for me. For a long time I thought I needed to understand the shape of something before I could move through it. Now I’m realizing I might only need enough structure underneath me that I’m free to discover the shape while I’m moving.

Maybe that’s why getting my braces off felt strangely connected to all of this. I’d had them for a year, and by the end I knew exactly what I wanted: not some exciting new smile, just my teeth without all the machinery around them. When they finally came off, there wasn’t some giant emotional payoff. It was more like, oh. There you are. The mind can preview; life has to render. I think I’ve spent a lot of the last few years living inside that gap—knowing what certain parts of my life are supposed to feel like before physical reality has finished assembling them. The systems were part of the scaffolding too. Useful, necessary, occasionally annoying, but never meant to be the building.

And maybe this is what completion actually looks like for me. Not fireworks. Things disappear. The braces disappear. The open loops disappear. The need to remember everything disappears. The constant feeling that I need to reconstruct my entire life before deciding what to do at 2 p.m. disappears. What’s left is surprisingly ordinary: take a walk, listen to some music, make something when I feel like making something, handle what appears in front of me. I built a lot of complexity underneath my life so the surface could eventually become simple. I don’t think I realized until now that simple was the thing I was building.