The Cult of Hard Mode

There is a moment in nearly every founder's journey when they abandon the elegant for the elaborate. It’s not when they scale past 10 employees or when they land their Series A. It usually happens much earlier, and it starts with a tool.

A friend recommends Apple Notes. Another swears by a simple Airtable base. But our founder wants to feel (key word) serious. So they build a fortress in Notion, layer it with custom automations, API calls, and embedded docs. They hire a systems thinker to map out a productivity architecture that looks like it could control air traffic. Within a week, no one on the team can find the meeting agenda.

This is not a fringe case. It’s a pattern. Where simplicity used to signal elegance and mastery, it now triggers suspicion.

Why?

Because hard mode is where status lives.

From Calvino to Kubernetes

In 1985, Italo Calvino delivered a series of lectures that became the book Six Memos for the Next Millennium. The first virtue he praised was lightness - the ability to distill, clarify, and float above the heaviness of the world. In Calvino’s hands, lightness was a form of intellectual and aesthetic grace.

I do not believe that tech culture today has any patience for lightness. Instead, it rewards baroque complexity. Engineers perform feats of convolution. Designers argue for maximal configurability. Founders pride themselves on having their own stack for everything. Lightness = for normies.

We see this in the proliferation of tools and frameworks. There is a productivity stack for every ideology: Zettelkasten for the information hoarders, PARA for the organize-everything crowd, Notion for the aesthetes, Roam for the graph-brained, Obsidian for the markdown monks. And under it all is the same impulse: make it harder than it needs to be, so I can feel smarter than I am.

It’s not that these tools are bad. Many are quite good. Obsidian is beautiful. But the way they are used - to signal intellectual rigor, to differentiate oneself from the casuals, to construct a lifestyle rather than solve a problem - shows off a moral hierarchy in which difficulty equates to virtue.

Protestant Workflows

The sociologist Max Weber traced the origins of capitalist discipline to the Protestant ethic: a belief in hard work, deferred gratification, and the visible signs of effort as a proxy for salvation. Replace salvation with credibility and you have the startup version.

A tool is good not because it is fast or elegant but because it shows you’re trying. That you’ve wrestled with the mess. That you’ve suffered enough to deserve results. The more complex the system, the more you must care.

Consider how often you hear phrases like "our internal knowledge graph" or "we built a custom CMS for this." These are rarely necessary. They are affectations - status signals designed to show that you're playing on hard mode.

Simple tools become suspicious. Using Apple Notes or Google Docs is like admitting you didn’t bother to invent your own language. But this is a strange inversion. In most fields, simplicity is the result of expertise. In tech, it’s taken as a sign you’re not even trying.

Complexity as Armor

In his 1957 essay The Hedgehog and the Fox, Isaiah Berlin distinguishes between thinkers who know one big thing (the hedgehogs) and those who know many little things (the foxes). Today’s tech elite aspire to be hedgehogs, but they build like foxes.

They pursue clarity in mission but bury it under layers of process. This is inefficient - largely because it’s protective. Complexity becomes a defense mechanism. If your system breaks, it’s because it’s complicated, not because you made a bad decision. If no one can understand it, that’s not a failure of communication - it’s proof of depth.

This is how obfuscation becomes sophistication. You don’t need to ship product if you can ship whitepapers. You don’t need to explain your roadmap if it lives in a Miro board that scrolls infinitely in all directions. If something goes wrong, you can always point to the architecture. Hard mode has an alibi.

The Boredom Taboo

There’s another reason simplicity offends. It’s boring. And boredom is culturally taboo in high-status circles.

To admit that a dumb spreadsheet solved your problem is to admit that you are not being “maximally interesting.” That your life and work could be made sense of without exotic theories or bespoke frameworks. This is unacceptable to people whose identity is built on being intellectually elite.

The fear is not that a simple tool won’t work. The fear is that it will - and that its success will render your complexity performative.

So instead of the boring thing that works, people gravitate toward the interesting thing that doesn't. This explains the allure of productivity porn, the endless TikToks and YouTube videos of people explaining their second brains. No one watches these to learn. They watch to feel like they’re part of an elite class that transcends the mundane.

Tool as Totem

When anthropologists study early religious practice, they often find that ritual objects become imbued with meaning far beyond their utility. A stick is not just a stick. It is sacred because it has been designated as such.

Modern productivity tools function the same way. They are not evaluated on how well they work. They are evaluated on how well they symbolize your membership in the right epistemic tribe.

The result is ritualized overbuilding. Knowledge workers create elaborate taxonomies, templates, color codes, and metadata schemes not because the work demands it, but because the ritual itself produces a sense of legitimacy. To open your Notion dashboard and see a cathedral of interlinked databases is to feel like a person who is doing serious work - even if no work is being done.

This is why simplicity will never go viral. It lacks theatricality.

Against Cleverness

A line often attributed (though likely apocryphally) to Ludwig Wittgenstein goes: “If people never did silly things, nothing intelligent would ever get done.” Whether or not he said it (and I like to think he did) it captures the playful, exploratory spirit of his later philosophy - the willingness to explore, to test, to tinker.

Tech, in its sombre genius, has left no room for silliness. The widespread belief = the harder something is to explain, the more value it must contain. This is the logic of jargon, of overwrought dashboards, of 14-tab workflows and recursive note graphs.

We have to learn to see cleverness not as a virtue but as a temptation. The simplest tool that solves the problem is the best tool. Anything else is vanity.

This does not mean we must become Luddites or reject innovation. It means we must recognize when our thirst for novelty is crowding out our tolerance for effectiveness.

The Return to Simple Tools

Some of the most effective thinkers and builders have advocated for simpler tools. Patrick Collison uses Google Docs. Paul Graham writes in plain text. Charlie Munger used legal pads and yellow highlighters. None of them were hurting for productivity.

The lesson here is not anti-technology. It is anti-theater. Simplicity scales because it reduces the cognitive overhead required to act. It does not announce your intelligence, it lets you apply it.

When everyone else is playing on hard mode for the social capital, you can win by playing on easy mode for the actual capital.

Use an index card. Use a spreadsheet. Use a notepad. Use the default unless you have a very specific, non-theoretical, non-theatrical reason not to. Avoid tools that require onboarding videos. Avoid ones that have communities.

Your goal is not to build a perfect system. Your goal is to solve the problem and move on. Think of productivity tools like duct tape or zip ties: functional, replaceable, and emotionally neutral.

Stop trying to impress your peers with the complexity of your systems. Impress them with the clarity of your thinking and the speed of your execution. The baroque dashboard is a crutch. Simplicity is a tool.

In a culture that rewards the performance of struggle, doing things easily is the most subversive act available.

And in that subversion, there is actual freedom.