Black and white thinking will ruin your life

My mother used the adage ‘life is a bitch, and then you die’ and continues to do so. I mean, life can be difficult, especially when we are anxious about the future and when the narrative that surrounds everything seems to make no sense. At least half of what we hear daily in the media creates fear and sounds like the plot of a chaotic b-movie. It’s virtually impossible to tell what’s real and what isn’t.

A killer virus?

A global recession?

Murder hornets?

Exploitative sex islands among the elite?

5 G?

People storming Capitol Hill dressed in fur?

Come on, 2022 — what else do you have for us?

Talking dinosaurs?

Robots among us?

Penguins taking over?

None of these narratives make any sense and from conspiracy theories to the actual real news make sense. And humans need to make sense of things.

The media thrives on that — presenting very simplified versions of the truth to get clicks and likes. Complex issues are written about in a black-and-white way with sensationalist titles designed to provoke. Look at any online article trying to prod people, and you’ll see a slew of lazy, angry commenters who didn’t even read the article.

People making sense of complex or chaotic events is a natural response. We respond better to a clear narrative and journey with closure at the end. And that is completely understandable. However, being extremely rigid in your beliefs will mean that you have an extremely hard time. You might find some culture or group to belong to as a result, but you’re going to have a hard time when it comes to anything outside your narrow scope of views.

I think a lot of this fighting came as a result of the isolation of the pandemic. Angry, scared, and confused people, bored and living a more isolated life, ended up spending way more time on the internet and consuming negative media. The majority of this and the overload of this information was intended to be divisive and exacerbate these feelings. Isolation in uncertain times, with heightened emotions, leads people down dangerous paths. To a certain extent, I feel bad for people who end up going down these rabbit holes.

Nuance is everything because, honestly, it’s not always a simple case of picking one side in life. And when things don’t make sense or people angrily disagree, their views are pushed more towards the extremities, which not only isn’t a great look but leads to a lot of suffering.

Here, I’ll pick ‘incels’ as an example of a black and white narrative that doesn’t help one’s situation. In fact, sometimes their very actions perpetuate the very problems that they state they have.

So let’s say a man is lonely and has a hard time finding a partner. It can be hard for men to find partners, and understandably this could potentially be frustrating. This man finds groups of men who feel similarly and finds himself part of a group who support each other. He finds reassurance that he isn’t the problem — it’s western women. Women are pathetic. So from there, he hears more and more to confirm his own belief system.

None of the men in this group acknowledge that they may have a very specific set of criteria for women that they would want to have a relationship with. Others have no hobbies or interests. Some have very few social skills. Others may honestly have had very bad experiences with women.

Whatever the reason is, they remove their accountability from the situation and refuse to work on themselves. This echo chamber makes them believe that every single woman is wrong — not them.

Can you see the problem here?

Some of the men he talks to state that they will go abroad to find a more traditional and submissive woman. Many of these men do that and find a poorer and possibly beautiful woman who they think loves them. Maybe they do, maybe they don’t, but when one person is a lot richer than the other, the power dynamic is off. Perhaps she gets pregnant, and the guy has to pay child support or brings her over and marries her. Until she receives permanent status in the country, he controls the situation. Sometimes they divorce, sometimes they don’t. So they are either the loving traditional wife for the bloodsucking gold digger — but either way, this reinforces their belief system — despite all evidence pointing to the contrary.

You see this with certain sections of feminism too (and yup, I’m feminist), boomers, QAnon peeps, homophobes, racists, and the whole vaccine/anti-vaccine debacle. And social media loves algorithms that keep us in our own little echo chambers to manufacture outrage.

You see this with the most extreme belief systems and conspiracy theories. It’s a pretty easy way to switch your brain off and make sense of the whole situation. It just creates more fighting, though. People read articles with a bias in mind looking for things that confirm their beliefs.

All you need to do is read an article by a woman or millennial here and see the comments talking about ‘whining’ and ‘entitlement’ when that’s not even happening in the article. You see it when a certain group airs some grievances about an issue, and people feel obligated to give out to them as if they were personally attacked. It also shows a lack of critical awareness.

People need to accept that the reality of plenty of situations is not black and white; it is not simple — it does not and will not necessarily make sense, and you should not try to force it into a narrative to make sense. We need to take some accountability at times for our situations and learn how we can incorporate them into our lives.

I mean, I’ve been in two abusive relationships. I clearly don’t hate men, but I am wary of them. Instead of giving up completely (which I would be entitled to do), I worked on myself to create stronger boundaries and worked on myself. And that’s not blaming others that would do things differently either, but I decided I had some part to play in these situations too. Being rigid in my views would mean that I wouldn’t have learned and developed and just decided to stay miserable. I only am around decent men now, have a great and well-raised son, and call out crappy men when I can.

People are complicated, their views are too, and polarizing people makes us fight about smaller issues instead of looking higher up. If everyone is fighting about masks, we might forget about racism, yeah? If people ask for equal rights, it’s easy to dismiss them as moaning?

When you haven’t had it easy, another group consistently talking about their lived experience probably sounds like nails down a chalkboard. It’s not black and white, but learn to expand your views, or everything will at best annoy you. Have a little empathy and open up your myopic views to listen to others.

In the comments section, I can guarantee that some people will refuse to admit a nuance to most things. People will cherry-pick exactly what they want out of 5% of an article to highlight their own biases. I’m waiting for you because it’s predictable and boring and demonstrates the point of the conversation.

Stop seeing everything as an attack on you personally and learn to adapt to the world around you or to quote the ski instructor in South Park ‘you’re gonna have a bad time.’