Aging: The Loss of Complexity

by Scott Sonnon

As we age, we strive to make life simpler in the attempt to reduce it to its most essential characteristics. Unfortunately, oversimplifying accelerates the aging process, since aging is the loss of complexity in the system.

Professor Mario Kyriazis, medical adviser to the British Longevity Society, explains. “If you want to live a long and healthy life, quite the worst thing you can do is to avoid stress to either mind or body. Aging is due to the loss of complexity in our system, and the way to boost complexity is to challenge the system. If you want to live long and healthily, don’t settle into routines.” The Times Online

Aging - this gradual loss of complexity - results from the deterioration of an organism caused by strain (an over-abundance or under-abundance of stress), which eventually ends in loss of the animating force: an event that we call "death." See full article

As Einstein wrote, "Life should be simple, and no simpler." And yet the fitness industry is inundated with the "ultimate in simplicity.” This marketing hyperbole plays into the craving that people have to make things easier to understand, which caters to what they already know and already can do. Unfortunately this not only doesn't aid their fitness, it accelerates the aging process.

Think of it this way: The simpler the movement, the less movement that one must do. The more that you repeat the simple movement, the more conditioned that simple movement becomes. The more conditioned that simple movement becomes, the more that it's repeated. The more those simple movements are repeated, the less one attempts complex movements. The less complex movements attempted the less stimulation of growth. Finally, the less stimulation of growth, the faster the system ages due to inactive growth.

The nervous system craves complexity!

I feel myself starting to prefer simplicity in my routines. I assume that my mind prefers this “mindlessness” because of how complex my life has become with children, multiple companies, floods of projects, and the endless sea of daily surprises that life affords. Who wouldn't want to make the sanctuary of exercise as simple as possible, right?

Simple, but no simpler.

We need to keep challenging our nervous systems. We need to keep improving our complexities. We need to learn new skills. We must continue to return to that stumbling, bumbling chuckle of incompetence that is the hallmark of the rapid learning curve of children.

Children don't learn better than adults. That goes against everything logical about complex systems. What separates adults from children is that when adults hit a critical threshold they have a tendency to try to make life as simple as possible. They often err too far into over-simplification.

Bruce Lee wrote that before formal training, a punch is just a punch. Once training begins, and for the first few years, a punch is much more than a punch. After substantial experience, a punch is just a punch again.

It's a great thing to master a subject, but once mastered it's time to move on to another subject, or to a deeper, more complex aspect of the same subject. To avoid accelerating the aging process we must forever thrust ourselves into beginner's mode, where we find out how much more there is to the subject before it becomes simple again.

Simple, but no simpler.

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