Why does tech have to make everything so complicated?

In this sleekly automated modern world everything, actually, seems to be taking longer, with more grunt and grumble along the way.

t feels like the idiots are racing each other to make things ever more complicated, in a scheme to keep our existences distracted, discombobulated and frustrated.

“Too hard.” It’s the new mantra for living serenely, from a mate, and it’s on repeat in my head as I struggle to turn on a bathroom light in the middle of the night at an achingly cool hotel, while book touring, that I do not want to ever return to. I had somehow switched off the master switch to every light and was now plunged into a darkness that was the consistency of black velvet, with no way free of it. This lighting arrangement was all too needlessly complicated, as if it was specifically designed (with cackle) to thwart, blindside and frustrate the user; I was held in a very now clench of “too hard”.

Ah, modern life, are you wilfully trying to break us in and break us down with your needlessly cruel ways? And don’t get me started on the design of the hotel’s bathroom tap, or the multiple passwords for just about everything in our lives, that need to be changed with infuriatingly frequency. Or the two-factor identification that has me questioning my sanity when I can’t quite discern all the boxes the motorcycles are meant to be in. I’m sorry, uuurgh, but all, just … “too hard”.

As is the office which no longer has bins under its desks because management sees cleaners as something to cut back on, so you’re forced to dispose of your rubbish by walking a very long way. And the television that doesn’t flick on with a mere button but drags you through multiple and increasingly infuriating steps to get you to the show you want, by which time the moment has, quite possibly, passed.

And what about the office tower with no reception desk any more, with all the wage-saving that entails, so that the individual has to let themselves in to lifts and various floors via a complicated system of iPad sign-ins to individual desks? In this sleekly automated world everything, actually, seems to be taking longer, with more grunt and grumble along the way. And what about the intriguing condescension of the “specialists” populating the Apple store, with their chips of cold they mistake as cool, which makes you want to go anywhere but the Apple store to buy its product. “Too hard.”

Because in their subtle ways all these tricky situations are primed to make you, the user/consumer/buyer, feel lowly, thwarted and inferior. At an electronics store I want someone who can look me in the eye with connection and warmth. Who doesn’t look down at me because of my technical illiteracy. Who doesn’t palm me off to another person, then another, who then makes an appointment for a smugly labelled “Genius Bar” that I can only get access to in a few days’ time – when I’m here to just walk in and walk out, with product. What of the elderly navigating this cynical world?

I do not want to be traversing the hot coals of life, in complication. Crave the certainty of simplicity. The balm of it, expansiveness, quiet. We’re conditioned to believe our existences will be an upward trajectory into comfort and clarity, where paths are smoothed and ways eased; that our futures will be about a lack of grubbiness, inconvenience and grunt. Yet the relentless cruelties of capitalism, with all their consumer manipulations, tell a different story.

I crave the clarity of simplicity. Its beauty and ingenuity. Crave a simplicity which liberates the mind into creativity. It feels like the idiots are racing each other to make things ever more complicated, in a scheme to keep our existences distracted, discombobulated and frustrated. “Too hard,” says my mate, about so much now, and it’s become my light-hearted mantra too. Like her, I’m doing it my way by opting out of unnecessary complication – in an attempt to stay sane, grounded and calm. For asConfucius said, so long ago, “Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.”