Stuff We Rike #3 Complexity

"Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated."

-Confucius

The list of figures whose wisdom have permeated to the present is a short list and Confucius is one of the few figures who have withstood the test of time and made the "their axioms will have credibility until the end of time," shortlist. You may be wondering how this quote pertains to what Asians like but let me assure you it does.

The collective "we" that Confucius is referring to are Asians. Asians have shown the collective ability to take any simple situation and make it about 376.41% more complex than it should be. Now why 376% more complex? Because 376% would just be too simple a figure. Do not get me wrong however, this does not mean that Asians cannot operate in complex situations; they actually thrive in such situations. In fact Asians take immense pride in the complexity that they surround their everyday lives with. In fact if Confucius says so, it must be true. Let's examine this phenomenon a little more in depth.

LANGUAGE

One of the easiest places to see how Asians choose complexity over simplicity is in how they communicate. From the earliest days of writing where symbols and pictograms were used to convey information to today's modern forms of communication, language and particularly the written language has gone through an immense amount of simplification. Most written languages throughout the world share similar beginnings with pictorial representations and a few Rosetta Stones and modifications later arrive at an alphabet system to make things simpler.

Asians, and more specifically the Chinese, however, have chosen to not only choose not to simplify their written language with an alphabet but have stuck with using one character to represent one idea. This is the Chinese character for "I": 我. Seriously. And you wonder why Chinese is so hard to learn? Because it is complex. Asians love that their languages are insanley hard to understand and learn and take pride in the fact that their languages are hard to decipher; we like to be a complicated bunch.

Entertainment

People like to do enjoyable things and engage in activities to entertain themselves themselves for the sake of fun. One of the most time tested of these activities is checkers; easy to learn, difficult to master. Traditional checkers takes place on an 8x8 board that has alternating squares where pieces can only move in two directions. We all know the game. We have all played it at some point in our lives.

Now what happens when you cross checkers with Asians? You get Chinese checkers. Let's take the game of checkers, find out how we can increase its complexity and then we can call it an Asian parlor game. The thought process going into creating Chinese checkers mus have gone something like this: A square board? Too simple. Oh let's make the board a hexagram instead. Two sets of pieces? Too simple. Oh let's actually make six sets of pieces. 64 squares? Again too simple. Let's make 121 indentations instead. I guess if If we allow the pieces to still jump we can still call it checkers. Whallah! I present you Chinese Checkers!

EATING

Food and the need of it is one of the few human necessities. How Asians choose to eat their food is another way that Asians choose to over complicate their lives. I am going to reiterate once againthat everybody needs to eat. Food is a must. You would think that you would like to consume food in the simplest manner possible. Asians disagree. In fact most Asians choose to eat their food by using two rounded sticks to pick things up. Some may be saying that they know how to use chopsticks and that they are highly efficient. I answer you this. Do you take pride in being able to use any other eating utensil? Have you ever heard anybody gleefully state, "Yes! I can use a spoon!" Probably not. And lastly, what other eating utensil comes prepackaged with instructions.

Math

Asians like math. They prefer complicated math. This is a topic for another day.