I’ve been thinking a lot about how we as humans make every choice, every act, every trait, every thought, every decision we encounter or experience as a binary unit. This or that. Here or there. Wrong or right. Love or hate. Success or failure.

It’s very simple to approach things in such a limited way. It reduces our cognitive load. The brain loves patterns and simplifying choices, and therefore it creates binary outcomes. Direct opposites. Contrary poles. Except nothing in our modern life is as simple as what our brains want to achieve. While they might be factual, they are not truthful.

We often feel like failures in our lives. If we haven’t achieved all the things we set out to accomplish, that we are deficient and disintegrating into futility. We’re often told to understand our strengths and weaknesses. Positives and negatives. Except that hardly contains the full picture. What constitutes our reasoning behind these comparisons? What is a positive? What is a weakness? What is a failure? What is a good decision? How much time is needed or number of people involved or branching and layered outcomes examined to determine our binaries?

Our weaknesses are opportunities for strength and our strengths are just a step away from being a weakness. Failures are wisdom and learning. Choices are steps in a direction. Normalcy is an illusory perspective. Our binary guardrails shortcut communication, eliminate empathy, hobble logic, obscure understanding, and diminishes collaboration with all other humans who we feel are “opposite”.

You are contradictory set of double negatives and illogical thoughts and complicated threads. You are an array. You are a spectrum. You are a rainbow. You are wonderful chaos. It’s time to stop being so 01100010 01101001 01101110 01100001 01110010 01111001.