I hesitate to even bring this topic up. Talking about complexity, you might as well have most people shut down. And for us in marketing, it’s certainly taboo – like a four-letter word you never utter.
“People don’t want complex. They want simple.”
“Too many words. More pictures. It’s all too much.”
And look, I grew up in the Midwest in the 70s and 80s. I get it.
Back then, you had your own world that concerned you. People focused on their friends and families. They knew their neighbors. They didn’t really need to demonstrate some in-depth knowledge of the broader world, per se. Yeah, when you went to college, all the East Coast know-it-alls would call you naive or make fun of your lack of worldliness.
But they were the ones who had it wrong.
After all, unlike them, you understood what was important. You learned to hone in on what you could control or see in your immediate field of view. It made you a master of your little universe.
Was it insular? Sure. It also kept things simple and straightforward.
You could do this because there was trust that the institutions you always relied on – business and government – would generally try to do the right thing when push came to shove. The food system, the healthcare system, the financial system, and the education and employment systems in place were not going to harm you in a great way.
Companies needed workers. And workers needed employment.
And there were generally accepted practices in place.
No bosses calling at 7:30 p.m. at night. No rising oceans to worry about. No crazy, out-of-control orange morons running the country. The rule of law and stable government, regardless of political affiliations, was a given. There was a handful of billionaires, some corrupt, but mostly nothing to be overly concerned about.
Sure, technologies disrupted lives and industries back then. But typically, that was concentrated. Nothing that could be considered a tidal wave that could decimate a majority of jobs in multiple industries all at once.
Savvy individuals, after all, could always figure out how to move to do something else.
For successive generations, this was a repeatable process.
The problem we all face today: The trust that institutions have our back is gone. (And with good reason). And the broader world is fast intruding on everyone’s doorstep.
That desire to embrace simplicity? It’s quickly turning into a need to understand more complexity. And it’s more important than ever to be aware of what’s going on.
Because what used to seem like chaos far away is now immediate. The war in Iran. AI disruption. Oil prices. Dictatorship. Tariffs. DOGE. ICE raids. Economic uncertainty. It’s not just about connecting these things to you or your wallet (though all of these certainly are). If you really think about it, almost everything that happens today is the result of events that have been happening for years, in slow motion, building steadily while we were all focused “on our own lives.”
That’s why now is the time to rid ourselves of the simple and start to try to understand the more complex things out there.
Why Embracing Complexity Is a Must in the Modern Age
I’ll say this upfront: I want simple as much as the next person. It’s easy. It takes no thought. I can focus on my world, my life. And not get brought down by the rest of the world.
And if you can continue to do that, I would say more power to you.
But in an age where cartoon villains reign, and a machine can do “average” and simple really well, that characteristic of people not comprehending things beyond their own immediate world becomes a real liability.
Why?
Because the more the world gets complex, the more “average” and “simple” get handed to machines, and the more dangerous it becomes to only understand your tiny slice of reality.
One Key Benefit: Less Manipulation, Fewer Fraudsters, and Knowing Reality
Let’s ask a quick question: Do you accept everything you see on the surface? Can you tell what’s real and what isn’t? Those Instagram photos? Is it AI? Or a real human being?
If you start embracing complexity (and the fact that things are generally pretty complicated), it actually forces you to consider multiple angles. As a result, you’re less likely to be manipulated by a machine, one of our business or government villains, political propagandists, and financial fraudsters, because their stories depend on you craving simple answers that don’t take a lot of depth or research. You know, easy-to-understand heroes, simple enemies, and fixes that seem too good to be true.
Want to know why the current administration wants to decimate education? Well, if you’re a fraud, it’s a threat to your very existence.
When you’re used to thinking across systems (seeing how incentives, constraints, and tradeoffs actually work), you notice when someone’s narrative is too clean, too emotionally satisfying, or too neatly aligned with their interests to be real. The same way you can spot when an automated system is wrong because you understand the moving parts, you can see past con artists’ easily identifiable lies or one-dimensional pitches, and start asking the harder questions their scripts can’t handle.
In other words, with a mindset of complexity, you’ll be a lot safer.
Why “Simple” Work Gets Automated First
Most of what people call “keeping it simple” at work is really doing routinized, narrow tasks inside a very small frame of reference.
- Studies of automation risk consistently show that jobs made up of routine, predictable tasks (e.g., data entry, basic customer service, standard admin work) are the first to be automated because they’re easiest to codify.
- One analysis by McKinsey finds that about 51% of job tasks across industries can be automated, and that routine-heavy sectors like admin support, retail, and transportation are especially exposed.
If all you can do is follow clear, simple rules inside a tightly defined box, you’ve basically described the ideal workload for an algorithm. In that world, “simplicity” is not a virtue; it’s a bulls-eye.
Understanding Complexity Means Staying Useful
By contrast, the work that’s hardest to automate sits precisely where things are messy, interconnected, and ambiguous, where someone has to interpret conflicting signals, balance tradeoffs, or design systems rather than just operate them.
An earlier report by McKinsey on automation and skill shifts shows that as AI spreads, demand rises for roles that combine technical literacy with problem solving, systems thinking, and managing complex interactions among people and technologies.
Even in highly automated environments, humans are still needed to monitor, interpret, and correct automated systems, but only if they understand enough of the underlying complexity to recognize when the machine is wrong or the context has changed.
In other words, the value migrates from “doing the task” to “understanding the system around the task.” If you can see how the parts fit together – across products, regulations, markets, cultures – you’re much harder to replace.
Why ‘Connecting’ Things Together Will Become Increasingly Valuable
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the importance of “connecting” different things that happen in different spheres of life in the modern world. I was getting at this a little bit with the piece I wrote the other day on metaphors in marketing – the idea that you have to have knowledge in one area and be able to apply it to what may seem like an entirely separate topic.
But I think it’s more than that in terms of the skills we’ll all need in the modern age and beyond. Unless we all start becoming aware of what’s going on and connecting it to how it may affect all of us down the road, I worry that, increasingly, we’re going to see many of us being blindsided by events or developments that they could’ve potentially predicted ahead of time.
Let’s give an example.
Las Vegas: What’s Really Happening in Sin City?
I was watching a web documentary on what’s happening to Las Vegas. Casinos look emptier on the average weekend, and the city drew about 7.5% fewer visitors in 2025 than in 2024, dropping to roughly 38.5 million people, the lowest since the post‑pandemic rebound. On the surface, it’s easy to blame Orange Nightmare for his public pronouncements about how Canada should be part of the U.S. and the tariffs he enacted on our neighbor/ally. And, it’s true that data points to weaker international travel and a sharp drop in Canadian visitors as part of the problem.
But underneath that, there’s a lot more happening. This is a city that has gotten dramatically more expensive for normal people – average room rates hovering around the high hundreds of dollars, aggressive resort fees, and reports of everyday items like drinks and snacks being priced at extreme markups, while overall visitor spending on food, drinks, apparel and other non‑gaming categories has fallen by “millions of dollars.”
At the same time, total Strip gaming revenue for 2025 was roughly flat to slightly up (around $8.8 billion, a hair above 2024), even as visitation fell, which tells you that the people who still come are often wealthier and gambling more on average. Meanwhile, the ecosystem built around the “average Vegas trip” is taking the hit: hotel occupancy dropped, many mid‑range restaurants and small entertainment businesses reported softer traffic, and international arrivals fell more than 20% year‑over‑year, squeezing locals who depend on volume, not whales.
You can also see a generational shift eroding the old Vegas model from underneath. Younger adults are drinking less than previous cohorts – with some surveys showing roughly a third of under‑35s now abstaining – and they can place sports bets or play casino‑style games from their phones, which makes a flight to Nevada feel less essential.
Tourism analysts explicitly link the drop in younger gamblers and reduced alcohol use to Vegas losing some of its traditional appeal, even as the marketing machine keeps selling the same “what happens here” fantasy. Looked at as a whole, Las Vegas isn’t dying; it’s being re‑tuned to extract more from fewer, richer customers, while the mass‑market veneer of the wedding chapels, mid‑tier shows, and local service jobs quietly absorbs all of the downside.
Yes, what’s happening in Vegas is some of Orange Nightmare’s fault. But it’s not entirely on him.
And that’s what embracing complexity actually means. You don’t just buy an easy through line. You have to delve into the details of what’s happening. You’re forced to hold multiple truths at once – that foreign tourism and Canadian visitors are down, that policy and geopolitics matter, that prices have outrun middle‑class budgets, that younger generations drink and gamble less, and that casinos can still post big wins while the average Elvis impersonator and line‑cook see their incomes slide. Seeing all those moving parts makes you much harder to fool, whether by a politician’s blame‑shifting, a casino executive’s spin, or any other simple story that depends on you not looking too closely at how the system actually works.
But that’s where I do believe opportunity is, too.
If you know this and understand the complexity of it, you can design something for someone that will have real benefits because they’ll reflect what’s actually going on. A machine could analyze the entire situation, sure. But knowing what to do for other people? That’s harder for a machine because it has to understand the nuances, put the right pieces together, and tell the right story in a persuasive way. Only people can do that.
Can People Really Change to Reject the Simple and Entertain the Complex?
It’s human nature to shy away from things that are complicated. And for those who already consider the complex and know those who don’t, the key takeaway might be simply: “You know, people don’t change.”
All of that might be true.
But a lot of this is about slightly adjusting one simple behavior – your first instinct. Instead of simply accepting what you hear or what you see, start being more curious, asking questions that go beyond your immediate world and the things you already know.
“Why is that happening?”
“What’s really going on there? Give me the full picture.”
No one, after all, is asking you to understand how the universe works.
I think if we can all start doing this a bit more, we can not only end the reign of these con artists and fraudsters (and put ourselves in a much better position to survive in the Machine Age), but our world literally becomes bigger. Richer.
That alone should be worth considering.
