The Simplicity Trap

I want to believe I can sort it all out.

Read enough. Follow enough threads. Demonstrate enough curiosity about geo-politics, economics, media, technology—and eventually the whole picture will resolve into something coherent. A story I can hold in my head. I keep pulling threads, hoping the next one will be the one that ties everything together.

Recently I pulled a thread about civilizational collapse. With all the talk of American decline and authoritarian resurgence, I got curious: what actually happened when the last great hegemony disappeared? What was life like after Rome fell? I expected the revisionist take: “it wasn’t that bad, actually; what you learned in school is mostly myth.” That seems to be how these investigations go lately.

I never got there. Something else hijacked my attention.

Buried in the research was a fact I’d never encountered: roughly 40% of humans currently alive depend on a single industrial process for their existence.¹ It’s called the Haber-Bosch process. I’d never heard the term before.

The Haber-Bosch process converts atmospheric nitrogen into ammonia, which becomes fertilizer. That’s it. The chemistry was figured out in 1909 and industrialized by 1913.²

I’d always thought of fertilizer as a bonus. You spread it on crops to make things grow a little faster, a little greener. An enhancement. What I learned is that nitrogen isn’t an enhancement—it’s a hard ceiling. Plants need it for proteins, chlorophyll, DNA. They can’t use the nitrogen floating around in the air; the molecular bond is too stable. Before Haber-Bosch, the only nitrogen available to agriculture came from bacteria, decomposing matter, and the careful rotation of legume crops.

That ceiling capped how many people the Earth could feed. Maybe 2-3 billion at subsistence level.

Current population: 8+ billion, with significantly better nutrition per capita. The difference is synthetic fertilizer. The process consumes something like 2% of global energy production, and in return, it keeps most of humanity alive.

A single industrial process, running continuously, is responsible for the existence of 3+ billion people. And we never talk about it.

This fact caught me up short. Not my curiosity—I’m still curious. But it reframed my sense that curiosity would eventually produce a master narrative. That if I just read enough, I’d arrive at the story that explains everything.

Some things don’t bend to narrative. They’re infrastructure. Invisible, load-bearing. Diffused across the contributed effort of millions of people, and indifferent to our need for coherence. Haber-Bosch doesn’t fit into the debates we have about food systems, sustainability, industrial agriculture. It sits beneath all of them, holding everything up, while we argue about things that feel important but rest on a foundation we don’t even know is there.

There’s a constant pressure to make simple stories out of a complex world. I feel it. The cognitive load is real, and the desire for a narrative that makes sense is human.

There’s a strain of thinking—let’s call it “contemporary myth-making”—that imagines we’d be better off with less complexity: smaller scale, more local, more “natural.” Industrialized nitrogen fixation doesn’t fit those myths.

And without synthetic nitrogen fixation, billions of people starve. Not theoretically. Literally.

There’s a distinction worth holding onto.

It’s fine to draw boundaries around what you’ll engage with. To simplify for yourself. To say: I can’t track everything, and I’ll trust that other people are handling the things I don’t understand. That’s not ignorance—it’s grace. Curiosity with limits.

But that’s different from insisting the world is simple. From building policy or identity on the fantasy that complexity is a disease we could cure if we just went back to something purer. The complexity isn’t a problem to solve. It’s the condition we live in. Beneath the stories we tell, there are processes we’ve never heard of, running continuously, keeping us alive.

I never did find out what post-Roman life was like. I got derailed by something more immediate: the recognition that we’re standing on machinery we can’t see, and the honest response isn’t to demand it become visible—it’s to accept that it won’t, and to be grateful anyway.