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Key points
- Holding two opposing thoughts in our heads at the same time is the hardest and most important skill.
- Embracing the messy gray is crucial to making informed choices, growing in our relationships, and producing good work.
Are COVID vaccines the only way forward, or do breakthrough infections render them useless? Can screen time for kids be educational, or does it devastate their attention span and creativity? Should you base your life trajectory and self-worth around your career, or have a job that pays the bills so that you can spend your free time doing what matters? Is it possible to have “privilege” when you grew up poor and life was challenging in all sorts of ways?
When we read the news, scroll through social media, and encounter seemingly endless op-eds, news commentaries, and advice columns, we are impressed by how hard (and un-click-bait-y) it is to hold two opposing thoughts in our heads at the same time. COVID vaccines are necessary and imperfect. Screen time has positives and negatives. Careers are important, but don’t need to be your only priority. You can be privileged in some ways and not others.
In the words of F. Scott Fitzgerald (who perhaps picked it up from Hegel), holding two opposing thoughts in our heads at the same time is challenging. There are several reasons for this. Of course, it’s easier to make money by peddling one extreme position than by encouraging nuance and complexity. Additionally, when we experience cognitive dissonance, the perception that two ideas or actions contradict one another, we become uncomfortable and try to resolve the contradiction. It’s also more effortful to wrap our heads around a complex situation with multiple perspectives than to settle for a simple answer. We love shortcuts, and everyone prefers a tl;dr to a long article hashing out both sides of the coin.
However, as we tell our patients, black and white is easy, but balance and truth are in the messy gray. You and your partner are both right and both wrong. It was sort of your fault, but also not.
While holding two (or more) thoughts in our head at the same time is hard, it’s also a most important skill. Embracing the messy gray is crucial to making informed choices, growing in our relationships, and producing good work. It allows us to consider a fuller range of options, both for ourselves and for others, and to recognize the contradictions that all arguments, situations, and people bring to the table. Although you may still choose to emphasize one argument over the other, you will do so without dismissing the alternative.
So the next time someone tells you something that sounds deceptively neat and simple – “the key to parenting is…”; “there are three types of workers…”; or “all you have to do to lose weight is…” – be suspicious and remember the most important tl;dr – there is none.
