Wonderful complexities

I feel as a person the most alive and human and full of wonder when I am contemplating complexities. The ability of humans to read meaning into patterns is the most defining characteristic we have.

Eleanor Catton has won the Booker Prize. I haven't read The Luminaries yet, but I'm more excited about it than I have been by any Booker-winning book in a while.

This is from an interview with the Guardian.

I'm posting it as a reminder. As a product manager and a UX designer, I spend much of my time battling complexity, trying to make things simpler and easier to use.

This is usually the right thing to. It's all too easy to forget, though, that human beings are engaged and often thrilled by complexity. We seek out patterns and we love a challenge. It's about context, though. In a book, complexity can turn a simple story into a novel that you think about and discuss for days, weeks even years after you've read it. In a game, complexity can make you want to play again and again.

If you're simply trying to accomplish a task, complexity becomes a frustration. It depends on context.

It also depends on the individual. A novel that one persons loves for it's many layers is a novel that another person loathes because it is a disorganized mess pretending to be literature.