The Bad News is Everything is Complicated

Every day, we are bombarded with sensory input which, if we were “awake” to all of it, would render us incapacitated in a corner somewhere. Our brains do us a big favor by quickly sorting all our experiences into neat categories so we can efficiently navigate the information-pandemonium that is human existence. And the crazy part is that we’re not even aware our nifty brains are doing this at all! Unfortunately, the price we pay for this efficiency is binary bias, which is distorted thinking that reduces things on a spectrum down to two categories.

Good and bad.

Right and wrong.

Or, if we want to take an example from the Bible, clean and unclean.

I could go on, but you get it.

We take concepts that are nuanced, complex, and multi-layered and we reduce them down so that we don’t have to do the heavy lifting of gathering all the information, listening to all sides, synthesizing opposing ideas, and formulating a comprehensive opinion.

Today’s episode focuses on the value of complexifying everything.