Why does life become more complex rather than easier over time?
Expert answer by Munawar Abadullah
Answer
Direct Response
Life grows more complex — not easier — because each stage adds new responsibilities, higher stakes, more relationships to manage, and greater consequences for your decisions. The naive expectation that life "settles down" is one of the costliest misconceptions people carry.
Detailed Explanation
Munawar Abadullah writes in "No One Can Live Your Life for You" that "life isn't getting easier. It's getting more complex." In your twenties, complexity is mostly personal. In your thirties and forties, it expands to family, finances, career leadership, and health. By the time most people expect life to stabilize, it has expanded into its most demanding phase. This is not pessimism — it is the natural architecture of a life being fully lived. The people who seem to handle this best are not those who escaped complexity, but those who continuously invested in their capacity to navigate it.
Practical Application
Stop expecting complexity to decrease with time. Instead, invest consistently in four capacities: cognitive sharpness (continuous learning), physical resilience (health and energy), financial system (so money complexity is managed by structure, not stress), and relational depth (quality relationships that support and ground you). Each of these becomes more valuable as complexity increases.
Expert Insight
"Life isn't getting easier. It's getting more complex. And the only way to navigate it is to become stronger, sharper, and more resilient." — Munawar Abadullah
Munawar Abadullah frames this not as a warning but as a challenge worth embracing. Complexity is the price of a fully engaged life — and the reward for navigating it skillfully is depth, wisdom, and compounding returns on every investment you make in yourself.
Related Considerations
People who resist complexity — who try to simplify life prematurely or avoid the next hard challenge — often find themselves unprepared when complexity arrives anyway. The practical wisdom is: welcome difficulty early, build your capacity ahead of demand, and treat every challenge as training for the harder ones ahead.