Why Finding the Gray Is So Hard
We know that black and white thinking is not good. In fact, it is a component of distorted thinking that is part of the diagnosis of depression and anxiety. It is targeted by cognitive behavioral therapists in an effort to combat depression, anxiety, and other negative thought cycles that contribute to feelings of inadequacy, failure, and helplessness. But knowing this information, you would be hard pressed to find many places in the media or elsewhere where you don't see black and white thinking running rampant. It seems that everywhere you turn, some pundit or talking-head is throwing black and white terminology at you. Every self-help book you pick up has such a simple straightforward answer to all of life's problems. It seems that we gravitate towards black-and-white thinking, and it creates a positive feedback loop whereby we see increasing amounts of it on a daily basis.
We know that black and white thinking is bad, and yet we're drawn to it. The media knows this and responds by providing more of it everyday. It's analogous to a drug addiction. We know that drugs are bad for us, yet people still continue to use them because they make us feel good and are addicting. And since the drug dealers and producers know this, they continue to provide increasingly more drugs until we are completely ill. Black and white thinking is a similar disease. It will lead to depression, frustration, anxiety, anger, and an overall lack of understanding of the true nature of reality. We, the people, are sick with regards to how we think about the world.
The allure of black and white thinking is no mystery. Black and white thinking is easy, it's comfortable, and it's a shortcut. It is a way to take a lot of information and put it into one simple phrase or word. If a research team performs a meta-analysis or a systematic review of a hundred different scientific experiments trying to determine whether hand washing with ash is effective, and the studies prove inconclusive, this irritates us. We want to hear that it is either good to wash your hands with ash and it is an adequate substitute for soap, or it is bad, and it does nothing. But when there is inconclusive evidence it creates dissonance within us, and it is most uncomfortable. So we either throw away the information deeming it as not useful, or we turn it into something that's easily digestible like Wonder Bread, and make it a black and white thing. We don't like to sit with uncertainty because it's uncomfortable. We crave easy answers that give us a straightforward rule. We like to hear, “yes this is good and that is bad, do this, don't do that.” We love hearing absolute statements because it makes us feel that we are doing something that we know is good, and it removes any conflict over our decisions.
But obviously, reality is gray. We know this as we look around us. People are not predictable. Economies are not predictable. We cannot control every variable. There isn't just one color green, but rather hundreds of different shades of green. We don't like this ambiguity because it makes it harder to proceed through the world with utter confidence and surety that everything we're doing is right. It's harder to store information in our heads in a usable format if we have lots of data points that are uncertain. We don't really like listening to scientists because scientists are gray, and they tell you their limitations and they tell you when they're uncertain about things, and it makes you feel uncomfortable. So then you look for a short clip by a news reporter to summarize what the scientist just told you. Of course the news reporter will give you some blacker or whiter version of what the scientist said. And then you'll take that fairly black version from the news reporter and you'll make it 100% black and go tell your friends, “hey this is the way it is,” when in reality it really isn't. In reality, the scientist gave you lots of gray, but you filtered it all out. You just wanted the black or the white because it was easy.
What we miss in this filtering out of gray and focusing on black and white, is kind of everything. Life lies in the gray zone. And if we want to learn from our mistakes and learn about humans, who are nuanced, we need to embrace this gray zone. Otherwise, we force the world to fit into a black and white bubble, which means that we now have a distorted view of reality. And learning what life is truly like (truth) will be more difficult with this distortion in place. If we want to see reality as it truly is, we must remove our filter and see the gray.
This new reality that does not filter out the gray is largely uncomfortable. It's largely unpredictable. It largely does not give us this assured sense of confidence that we crave when we're doing something because there's always going to be some type of nuance to our actions or outcomes. This gray world is a world that is far more accurate than a black-and-white world, but it is not necessarily more comfortable. Regardless, black and white thinking harms us in the long run. It harms us when we make a mistake because we say that we are the problem and that we are a failure, rather than seeing the nuance in our decision-making process and learning from it. It harms us when we take all people that look similar or sound similar and put them in a category and call them this or that as if they're all the same. It harms us when we try to see people that don't fit into normal categories because we fail to see their underlying human nature.
Exercise isn't always comfortable, eating healthy food isn't always comfortable, being patient isn't always comfortable. But that's what we need to do if we want to live a long, healthy, fruitful, and balanced life. It's up to us how we want to live, but we don't get to decide how reality actually is. Reality is gray - there is no place for your opinion or your filter in that. You can decide to observe the world through a black and white filter but it doesn't make it so. And in a battle between your distorted perceptions and reality, reality always wins and you'll be the loser. Embracing the gray may be challenging and uncomfortable at times, but it’s the only way to truly win in the long run.
