[10] Downgrading, or temporal digressions from simplicity




I remember an old Zen story about a monk whose dinnerware consisted merely of a single wooden bowl that he used for multiple purposes. One day, someone gave him a metal drinking cup. The monk accepted the kind offer and was happy with it for some time. However, soon it turned out that the new cup made a loud noise when moving around with it. At this point, the monk gave away the metal cup and continued using the wooden bowl only.

I recently had a similar experience. I kept using "Treepad Lite" as a personal information manager for quite some time. This is a freeware program that functionally replaces the card box systems of old times. It served me for bundling my countless small notes and memos in a single, searchable file. Its editor features are extremely limited: You cannot even use bold face or different font sizes in the same document. There came a day when I wanted the much richer set of functions of the "Plus" version - and so I purchased it. Once I had it, I immediately started to "improve" my old notes by using the new editing features. This process took quite some time - and it was totally useless: The essential information content of a text simply does not change by editing a view words to bold face or by indenting some sentences. Once I realized that the new possibilities just diverted my mind from the really important things, I actually deleted the "Plus" version from my computer and downgraded to "Lite". I am happily using it since then.