I just finished a book (shock horror; the ratio between books I start and books I finish is embarrassing), The Man in the Picture by Susan Hill. Aside from the beautiful mental images of Cambridge, Venice and Yorkshire it conjured, the book mentioned and reminded me of the principal of ‘Ockham’s razor’, a little nugget I picked up in the good old days of A-level philosophy of religion. Trusty wikipedia will do a better job of defining this than I will…

Occam’s razor (or Ockham’s razor), entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem, is the principle that “entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity” and the conclusion thereof, that the simplest explanation or strategy tends to be the best one. The principle is attributed to 14th-century English logician, theologian and Franciscan friar, William of Ockham.

Reading about that again led me to think that the principle could be usefully applied to our daily lives and not just when we’re trying, for example, to argue against the existence of a god. It is well-known that one of the main reasons for January depression is that people have failed to keep their many new year’s resolutions. If everyone opted for a simpler, single, less specific strategy or mantra to improve their lives, such as ‘be healthy’, there wouldn’t be so many different opportunities to feel failure and guilt. Instead people are resolving all at once to eat more celery, take up yoga, learn Mandarin, volunteer at the local donkey sanctuary and write weekly letters to Auntie Edna, which, frankly, is unrealistic.