My daughter and I have reached the stage of university life. I didn’t expect we’d have a deep, expansive conversation just two weeks into the semester.
Curious, I asked her what she thought of algebra and “next-level” analysis.
Her answer surprised me:
— Now I realize what it means to truly learn. It’s a long, staged, complex, difficult process, especially at the beginning. The professor doesn’t pause to ask where you are or how you feel; they just do their job, assuming you’re aligned with the material. I’ll have to find explanations myself…
— Do you think that if we only encountered simple things, we would have the motivation to move ourselves from within? — I asked.
— Ah, no… — she said.
In her response, I sensed a trace of dissatisfaction, but also a hidden wish that things were simpler. Broadly, I understood what she meant.
I remembered the confusion, doubt, uncertainty, and fear that gripped me during my first semester of college.
I was lost in myself: a foreign city, a completely new environment, unknown people, intellectually demanding tasks that required external attention and rapid adaptation.
Back then, I would have wished it were simpler.
Today, I would start over exactly as it was.
I can say with certainty that simplicity is not a starting point, but rather a point of arrival!
This is what I tried to convey to Alexia.
Increasingly, I notice an atmosphere of frustration around me, a search for “simplification.” Clients, former patients, friends, voices in the media—all ask the same thing: simple explanations, clear solutions, ready to implement immediately.
Quick recipes, short protocols, ideas that “just work.”
But is this a lucid request?
What are people truly seeking?
How can you offer someone a point of arrival if they haven’t even aligned with the start?
When we encounter something simple, someone, somewhere, once worked enormously to create it.
They studied, refined, tested, tried, failed, rewrote, distilled—until the essential revealed itself.
It’s not enough to listen to someone who has become famous overnight, appearing in the media or podcasts, lit by spotlights, explaining simple things (if they aren’t simple enough, there’s no audience).
True simplicity requires passing through complexity, wandering for a while, doubting sometimes, breaking yourself into pieces—and only then reassembling both yourself and the meaning.
Authentic simplicity is not superficial and cannot be handed to anyone as a ready-made recipe.
We live in a world that rejects thoughtful labor. I don’t fully understand why.
Perhaps because, apparently, it is difficult and boring.
We prefer the result, not the process; the immediate answer, not the journey toward it.
We get dizzy with the illusion of simplicity, available at a click.
ChatGPT, Google, or other forms of conversational AI have become symbols of “finding without searching.”
You get the answer immediately, without a path, without a journey, without the tension of creative movement within.
In art
Brâncuși simplified sculpture down to its essence. His forms cannot be copied. Each “column,” each “bird in space,” each stone that emanates light is the result of constant modeling, observation, and rewriting, until the poetry of the material came alive.
His friend Henri-Pierre Roché recounted in Memories (1957) that Brâncuși told him privately: “Simplicity is not a goal in art, but an effect of approaching the real meaning of things.”
The Kiss had its first version sculpted from a block of stone in 1907. With this sculpture, Brâncuși rejected the Symbolist aesthetic exemplified by Auguste Rodin (The Kiss, 1888–1889) and declared, as Sidney Geist suggests, his independence from the Meudon master.
If you look closely at The Kiss, you notice how two bodies entwined in an act of love emerge from a barely touched block of stone, forming a perfect union through their fusion.
Over forty years, the sculptor gradually reduced anatomical features to achieve total purification of the form—a mark he used as an architectural element, a decoration, and a signature in his love correspondence.
Thus, the work of mind and chisel was not completed in a day or a year; it fermented slowly, enzymatically, as a living process for four decades.
Sidney Geist, one of the foremost researchers of Brâncuși’s work, was the person who explained to the West, as early as 1968 (Brâncuși: A Study of the Sculpture), that Brâncuși is not “simple,” but “essential.”
He showed that behind every purified Brâncuși form lies a long process of thinking and refinement, not easy simplification.
In science
Einstein obsessively noted in his notebooks: “Simplify, simplify, simplify.”
The simplicity he sought was not reductionism, nor did it mean “easy” or “giving up”; rather, it demanded tireless work of clarification. And this did not mean eliminating complexity, but understanding it until its hidden order revealed itself.
His thought experiments—train and lightning, falling elevator, a body emitting light—were not theoretical games, but journeys through the darkness of complexity to uncover the essence:
Time is not absolute, but relative to motion;
The effects of gravity and acceleration are equivalent;
Mass and energy are two forms of the same physical reality.
Mass is nothing other than condensed energy, a highly dense form of stored energy in matter.
And energy, in turn, can be transformed into mass (as in nuclear reactions or particle accelerators).
The formula E = mc² seems simple.
But behind it lie years of cognitive processes, hours of experiments, reasoning, doubts, and continuous study.
In 1933, Einstein left Germany due to the Nazi regime and temporarily settled in the UK before moving to the USA. Sir Herbert Samuel, a great admirer of science and free thought, facilitated his arrival and organized several lectures. At one, “On the Method of Theoretical Physics,” given at Rhodes House, Oxford, the physicist concluded: theory must be as simple as possible, but sufficiently complex to explain the facts.
Closer to our times, if you want to study the Higgs boson, you cannot do it overnight. Just understanding the theoretical framework requires years of study.
What is the Higgs boson, really?
It does not “give” mass to matter; it is the evidence of the invisible field that makes it possible.
The Higgs field envelops the entire universe, like a subtle ocean through which all particles pass. Some pass through without resistance, like photons, remaining massless. Others, like electrons and quarks, “stick” to this field, and through this interaction, mass arises.
The boson is just the wave that betrays the ocean’s existence—it is not the cause, but the visible traces of a profound presence.
Seeing a “trace” of the Higgs boson may take a decade of preparation, calculations, experiments, and failures. And even then, you may only see a tiny deviation on a graph, a probabilistic trace, a hypothesis barely taking shape.
If you choose experimental physics and go to CERN in Geneva, you’ll discover that the simplicity of a formula conceals an entire universe of machinery, methods, and rigor.
It is a long path, requiring patience, time, discipline, and devotion to the process, not the result.
The simplicity of a scientific discovery does not come from ease, but from years of searching, refinement, and subtle understanding.
The same is true in life!
I believe that simplicity is not given; it is earned. It is a form of mastery.
In cinema
The film Heist of the Century, written by Cristian Mungiu and directed by Teodora Mihai, after numerous international awards, was selected to represent Romania in the “Best International Feature” category at the 2026 Oscars.
I listened to an interview and some recent statements from them.
The renowned Romanian director and screenwriter was asked about his other films—how he built them, their trajectory, how themes and styles took shape.
At one point, he said something essential: the simpler and more minimalist a film, the harder it is for the audience to receive it.
“Generally, simplicity requires more instruction.” — Cristian Mungiu
When we search for simplicity, the trap is to fall into convenience and be fooled by false authority.
When you yourself simplify things or processes, it means you have gone through the full generosity of their complexity. Everything else is just decoration.
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