GRACE'S MUSINGS: Uncomplicate the complicated
According to Jan Masters in an article in her new online magazine 60.life, “nothing is simple anymore”. Whether it’s verifying that we’re not a robot for what should have been a simple computer task, parking without having to download yet another app for payment, or trying to make an online purchase without being “bombarded with ideas for the very same thing you’ve just bought”, it’s what Jan calls the ‘Complification of Modern Life’ – and I could not agree more.
When did simply going about our everyday lives become so difficult?
Jan addresses this question humorously and masterfully (pun intended), and her article about the absurdity of ‘complification’ is well worth a read – as is her magazine. We do complicate our lives. The feeling that we need to be on top of absolutely everything at all times. Involved and endlessly engaged, we’re so busy believing we should be as busy as those busy people around us appear to be, we make living so much more difficult than it needs to be.
Jan says: “In the ‘complification’ of life, we have over-created, over-styled, overreached and over-burdened our lives in the quest to over-connect, over-accumulate and, here’s the really stupid part, make life easier.” She’s nailed it in this one sentence. We haven’t made our lives easier at all.
As a candidly vocal fellow PRO AGE warrior, Jan knows too well that midlife and beyond is a time when we start to declutter the domestic clutter that has kept us shackled to duty, together with the societal expectations we’ve followed, largely because we’ve had to. It’s a time of change, of fresh ideas and new opportunities, so the notion of ‘complification’ is even more agonising when all we really want to do is just get on with it – swiftly and relatively painlessly.
We’ve been around the block, we have the wisdom of our years, we are strong, resilient and resourceful, with a confidence that no longer worries first and foremost what others may think – so what we absolutely DO NOT need is to be held back by the tiny, albeit surmountable, hurdles of ‘complification’. It’s a phrase that sums it all up perfectly for me and I think I am going to use it again and again!
I have long been fan of Jan Masters’ writing and her take on life, and even more so after my interview with her back in March. Jan’s previous column ‘What is 60 for?’ in the Saturday Telegraph magazine was an unmissable weekly pleasure for me, and 60.life is a humorous, clever and illuminating magazine that follows on from that, covering so much more than highlighting some of the nonsense of modern living. Nostalgia, rants, modern life, PRO AGE and style – it’s all there. So if your day is becoming a little ‘over-complificated’ and could do with an injection of insightful humour to soothe and amuse – here is an online magazine that will make it all a little easier just at that point when it seems anything but.
