The Cathedral of the Unnecessary

Arjun Z. leans so far over the whiteboard that the tip of his nose almost brushes the dry-erase ink. He is an acoustic engineer by trade, a man who spends his life measuring the invisible weight of sound, yet today he is staring at a digital ghost. On the board is a diagram involving 33 separate microservices, a labyrinth of Kafka streams, and a distributed database setup that looks like a map of the London Underground drawn by a madman. The project? It is a tool for the marketing department to track internal equipment loans. There are 13 people in that department. They needed to know who had the extra camera lens. Instead, they were being handed a rocket ship with 43 different failover protocols.

I watched Arjun tap his marker against the plastic tray. He was proud of this. The complexity was a monument to his technical range, a testament to the fact that he could juggle high-concurrency architecture even when the concurrency in question was precisely 3 users at peak time. It was a masterpiece of over-engineering, a Cathedral of the Unnecessary. I realized then that we weren’t building a tool; we were performing a ritual. We were validating our own intelligence at the expense of the company’s 53-day deadline. It is a sickness I see everywhere now, this deep-seated belief that if a solution is easy to understand, it must be inferior.

The Addiction to Complexity

We live in a culture that confuses sophistication with value. If you spend 103 hours on a problem and emerge with a solution that a child could explain, there is a lingering sense of shame. We feel like frauds. So, we add layers. We add 23 unnecessary steps to the workflow. we implement ‘enterprise-grade’ solutions for problems that could be solved with a pencil and a piece of scrap paper. It’s an intellectual vanity that has become the primary drain on modern productivity. This organizational addiction to complexity doesn’t just waste money-though it certainly does that, to the tune of $33,003 in cloud hosting fees for a database that holds less data than a single high-resolution photograph-it creates gatekeepers. It makes work inaccessible to everyone except the priests who can read the runes.

Hiding Behind Jargon

This obsession with the intricate is a defensive mechanism. If a system is simple, anyone can criticize it. If it is complex, you can hide behind the jargon. You can tell people they don’t understand the ‘nuance.’ You can claim that the 13 layers of abstraction are necessary for ‘future-proofing,’ even when you know that the company’s strategy will change in 3 months. It is a way of ensuring that no one can ever tell you that your work is finished, or worse, that it was easy. We have turned the workplace into a series of Rube Goldberg machines, where a simple request to ‘update a font’ triggers a 53-step deployment pipeline that takes 3 hours to run.

“The most resilient systems I have ever seen were the ones where the documentation was 3 pages long because the logic was so self-evident it didn’t need explaining.”

In my interactions with high-end design, I’ve seen the opposite of this vanity. Take for instance where to do the visual field analysis which handles the intersection of science and style. There is an immense amount of technical data behind a single pair of lenses-refraction indices, vertex distances, the physics of light-but the user never sees the struggle. They see a pair of glasses that fits perfectly and helps them see the world. That is the true mark of mastery: taking the 103 variables of optical science and distilling them into a seamless experience. They don’t brag about how hard the math was; they just give you the result. That is the generosity of simplicity. They do the heavy lifting so you don’t have to.

The Resume Trap

Arjun Z. wasn’t building that microservice for the marketing team; he was building it for the version of himself that might apply for a job at Google in 3 years. He wanted the line on his resume more than he wanted the tool to work. This is the ‘Resume Driven Development’ trap. We sacrifice the 33 hours of our current team’s time to build a monument to our own future aspirations. It’s selfish, and it’s pervasive. I’ve seen startups spend 83 percent of their seed funding building a custom CRM when a $13-a-month subscription would have sufficed. They go bankrupt with a very impressive codebase.

There is a specific kind of arrogance in thinking that a problem is ‘too important’ to be solved simply. We equate complexity with gravity. We think that if a project is worth 3 million dollars, the solution must involve at least 300 pages of documentation. Complexity is brittle. Every new piece of logic is a new place for the machine to break.

Utility Over Aesthetics

We are currently in a cycle where AI and automation are being used to generate even more complexity. We use one tool to manage 13 other tools. We have dashboards that monitor other dashboards. Arjun Z. eventually finished his internal tool. It had a gorgeous UI, a redundant backup system, and a latency of 3 milliseconds. It also took 3 minutes to log in because of the 53 different security checks he had implemented.

I sat with Arjun Z. after the project was officially mothballed. He felt the users didn’t ‘appreciate’ the work. We had both failed. We had chosen the ‘interesting’ path over the ‘useful’ one. We had built the most complex version of the world because we were afraid that the simple version wasn’t enough to justify our existence.

The Quiet Inevitability of Good Design

But if you look at the things that actually last, they are rarely the most complex. They are the things that are so well-designed they feel inevitable. A paperclip. A well-balanced chair. A clear sentence. These things don’t scream for your attention. They don’t demand that you acknowledge the 103 hours of labor that went into them. They just solve the problem. They are an act of service.

We need to learn to fold the sheet without the 23-step manual, to write the code without the 33 abstractions, and to live with the fact that sometimes, a spreadsheet is exactly what the world needs.