“What is essential as you become an adult is … you have to refine the ability to hold two contradictory ideas in your mind at the same time without it driving you crazy.”
Bruce Springsteen
I have always stressed to both Austin and Victoria that there is no such thing as an unhealthy food, only unhealthy behaviors. To say that something is good or bad is easy but usually wrong. Instead, much more has to be considered, because only very, very rarely in life is anything wholly good or bad. Most of what we engage with in life lies somewhere in the “in-between” … the proverbial gray area.
But when powered by our biases, binary-thinking is tempting. It is easier. Dare I say it feels most natural? I wonder if it has something to do with evolution, heuristics, and the free energy principle, but if I think it might be so, odds are good that it’s probably not. But we do know that the brain is a computing machine (of sorts) and the storage and processing of 1-bit of data (yes/no, good/bad) is cheap for even the slowest of wet-ware.
What is biologically-expensive is respecting people while you are strongly disagreeing with them, empathizing with them when they attack, and loving them while they are blinded by fear and unreasonable emotions. What expends a lot of biological capital is trying to wrap your head around how “good” people can make horrific choices without being “bad”, and how they think the same thing about you despite your own obvious righteousness.
We could slow down and think things over. We could try to understand ourselves a little better and the “others” even more. We could stop talking so much and listen instead. We could contemplate before responding or reacting. We could deescalate rather than inflame. We could act more like adults. We could be the people who we teach our kids to become.
Then again, it’s easier to act like a child.