We all know that thrill of organizing our lives, building systems that work for us, designing calendars, finding the ideal method to manage to-dos, deciding where to write them down, how to view them, how to interpret them... even using AI to solve all of this. We're constantly building systems to solve problems, but are they really problems?
I used Notion for over 5 years. My life was in there. And I know many people have that place where they live digitally, where they know what they need to do, what they want to do, and how to do it. Everything organized in a system that, honestly, works for them. But in my case I realized something: I was overengineering my life.
So I decided to do something. I threw out all the complexity and switched to Apple Notes. As simple as possible. I wanted to test whether I truly needed the entire system I had been perfecting for years. All I was really doing was adding friction to my life. I wasn't improving it, I was just getting dopamine from organizing my system. I had turned it into something overengineered, full of things that seem necessary but aren't. There are too many things we don't need, that we don't even truly want. You only realize it when you step back for a moment and look at it from the outside.
We tend to say we need things when we don't. Why? Are we filling voids? What drives us to build increasingly complex systems? Do we really need them? Why do we need faster and faster software?
I perfectly understand the satisfaction of building something better than what came before, but when there's no real need, we end up overengineering our lives, creating unnecessary products, solving problems that never existed.
There is beauty in simplicity.