How Our Addiction to "Either/Or" Duality Can Cause Strife and Miscommunication

I often get accused of being a bit of a "fence sitter" because I believe life presents us with many shades of gray. The whole either-or duality just doesn't sit well with me, in most situations.

Life is just not that simple!

In some way, I think we owe many of the troubles in the world today to the simple fact that people live by ironclad boundaries between yes or no, up or down, black or white and so forth and so on.

You might think this is not a big deal but let me give you some simple examples.

Just the other day I cut up some peaches for us to have with breakfast. During breakfast Mrs. Denmarkguy started eating some peach, after first carefully taking off the skin.

I thought that was perfectly OK because that's her preference.

The duality in the situation came up when she remarked "Oh I see you like the skins. You can have mine if you want!"

When I declined her offer — which I know came from a place of love and kindness — she seemed slightly baffled.

The truth of the matter is that I don't specifically like the peach skins, I just accept they're an integral part of the peach, and I eat the entire peach as is, rather than separating off the skins. This is neither right or wrong, but to a lot of people "either-or thinking" dominates their life.

It's a case of "vanilla or chocolate", not vanilla and chocolate; not some vanilla and some chocolate.

Now, the above was a totally harmless example, but these kinds of dualities are not as harmless when it comes to things like politics or religion.

You have to be conservative OR liberal you can't be a little bit of both; you don't get to cherrypick the good things from each side.

My point is that we create these separations a lot of times to our detriment. We expect these neatly boxed solutions rather than expanding our minds to consider options that are outside the A or B. And that can be a bit problematic, and often causes some rather unpleasant arguments.

Thanks for reading, and have a great remainder of your week!

How about YOU? Are you likely to think in "either-or" terms? Or do you see many nuances? Do too many possible outcomes make you uncomfortable? Do leave a comment — share your experiences — be part of the conversation!

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Created at 20211221 23:24 PST
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