Is the world simple or complicated?
The world is what we perceive it to be, we all do not interact with the world objectively we interact with it subjectively, there is a mental model that we create in our mind of the world and how it works. It is interesting to know that everybody seems to think that they know how the world works but in reality what we know of the world is extremely little but our brain makes up believable stories to fill in the gigantic blanks of unknown information. This is done to prevent us from going insane, because the unknown is terrifying to us.
This is the reason why for some people they perceive the world as simple and others they view the world as complex, for example, for humans thousand years before us the world was fairly static, they were born, raised up in a single town or village or city and almost never left their location of birth in their lifetimes, they worked in the fields as their parents did, then they marry and have children and die, in their lifetimes they likely had the same set of friends in their entire adulthood, this went on from generation to generation long enough to leave an impression that the world was very simple and predictable, thus if you read history you’ll find that past people’s impression was that the world was simple and not at all complex, however, since the invention of electricity, human civilization accelerated, people’s lives were not simple anymore, they didn’t do the same things their parents did, they change residence every decade, they got new friends frequently and were exposed to new environments frequently, the world around them changes right before their eyes everyday, and thus modern people perceive the world as complex (this is generalized and there will be exceptions to the rule).
However there are somethings that change very little or extremely slowly no matter how fast our materialistic development, and that is us, humans. The truths and facts discovered about human biology changed very little in the past few millennia, human nature as observed for millennia hardly changed, and our interaction with each other use the same processes in different forms. The way our bodies react to the environment, the way we communicate and deal with other humans, and the mix of good and evil we all are has changed infinitesimally. What has changed is our society, our culture over the years, but our internal processes when dealing with society and embracing have not changed much. What has changed is the times we as a species hardly did, for an intuitive understanding, just imagine, if we took few random Mesopotamians and erased their memory and made them be reborn in ancient Rome, would they act like modern people or the local people of the times, and if we did the reverse would the reborn ancient Romans act like modern Mesopotamians or like ancient Romans.
The above gives us a way to navigate the present we are living in if we perceive it as complex, that is, we don’t need to look at how complex the changing world is, we just need to know some things that don’t change (or change so slow that they seem constant), and that is our human nature and human behavior, and all the complexities will be easier to fall in place around it and easier to handle because we perceive all the complexities as following the rules of human behavior and human nature.
The key is to know ourselves and the complex world becomes much easier to handle.
