I’ve been playing a game lately.

I have been posting daily updates on Facebook (yes, that’s right, I’m on Facebook) that I call “The Overly Complicated Saying of the Day”. The premise is this: I take a fairly common cliche or saying, and I change the words without changing the meaning in order to make it extremely convoluted.

Examples:
“What goes around comes around” becomes “That which begins at zero degrees on a circle will progress 360 degrees to its point of origin”.

“If you can’t stand the heat get out of the kitchen” becomes “Averse to a steply increasing thermal gradient? Hastily remove yourself from your personal mess hall”.

And finally,

“No matter where you go, there you are” becomes “Regardless of the location in which you find yourself, you will always find yourself in that location”.

Get the picture?

Well, this month, I’m going to preach, and then practice what I preach. Everyone knows the common acronym K.I.S.S., which means Keep It Simple, Stupid! The meaning? Don’t make a situation any more complicated than it has to be. In the scientific world, there is a corrollary to this concept: Occam’s Razor. Simply stated, Occam’s Razor says that the solution that requires the fewest number of assumptions is usually the correct solution. Even more directly stated: the simplest solution tends to be the right one.

What does this have to do with life and my Facebook status updates? I would like to submit that we human beings have a tendency to complicate our lives unnecessarily. Rather than tell the truth and face punishment for doing something wrong, our tendency is to lie and cover it up, which leads to more and more lies, until we become entangled in a convoluted web of lies. Rather than take a portion of our paycheck and set it aside of savings, we play risky games with credit cards and balance transfers in an effort to “beat the system”.

It’s a little like the game I’m playing on Facebook. These truisms that I have perverted by turning them into almost indecipherable strings of words are analogous to the ways that we sometimes tend to complicate our lives unnecessarily.

Bottom line: let’s look for ways to simplify our lives.

And to that end, I am going to adhere to another meaning of K.I.S.S…

…Keep it Short, Stupid!