John Maeda comes up with his ninth law of simplicity today:
Simplification most commonly occurs through
conscious reduction; the more uncommon form
involves subconscious compression.
The story which leads to this insight is a good one, and reminds me of my days as a psychotherapist.
You notice patterns when you engage in something intensely for a long time. In doing psychotherapy, you come to notice cognitive, emotional behavioral and/or relationship patterns that pop up across people over time. And while each person plays out the pattern with her own twist, the pattern itself is recognizable, like a melody sung in a different key. After a while, as Maeda indicates, you find that you've "subconsciously compressed" the pattern to some essential elements, and can express them in very few words, or even gestures.
One of these was the imagined "all or noneness" of change. Suggesting to an individual that (s)he could see things/do things differently very often solicits a response that indicates that the only possibility is doing the exact opposite of what they do today. It's as if the possibilities were binary: either never go out to socialize with friends during the week, or go out every night. Over time it became clear to me that this pattern's objective was to make change impossible, since the person either couldn't, or didn't want to, change that much.
The subconscious compression that occurred in my thinking about this was what I cam to call the "0-100 rule." I'd simply say: "If you're at 5 today on the going out scale, you don't have to go to 100. There's a lot of room between 5 and 100; how about we try 10?" This helped me help people broaden the range of what was possible for themselves in a simpler fashion than any elaborate conversation about "freedom."
But I realize that my understanding of that pattern came about subconsciously, not through an attempt to strip out elements of an earlier version. Live with things long enough (that is, "get older") and some of those things actually get simpler.
That may be what we call "wisdom."
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