They say the world is made up of two types of people. They’re wrong. The world consists of three types of people, but two of those types get all the press.
Journalists like to frame issues in a binary fashion – one side against another. That’s simple. It’s black and white. It’s A versus B. Reporters don’t do this because they can’t handle the complexity of multiple opposing points of view. They structure their stories as a duel between competing interests because readers find those stories easiest to digest. The audience finds such pairings quite familiar. Literature is replete with examples: Ahab vs. Moby Dick, Sherlock Holmes vs. Professor Moriarty, and Bambi vs. Godzilla, to name a few.
It’s not just drama. Philosophy often has an attraction to complimentary combinations. We see this most markedly in the Taoist notion of “dualistic-monism” as expressed in the Continue Reading “Are You an Instigator, a Skeptic, or Merely Somebody Else’s Tool?”
Age Matters Less When You’re Old Enough to Know Better
But speaking of those formative teenage years, remember when you were a senior in high school? You might have had a few junior friends. You barely acknowledged the sophomores. And, as for the freshmen… did your high school even have a freshman class? Who knew? Back then, who cared?
Today, it doesn’t matter what class they were in; if they were in high school at the same time you were, they were all your age. At this point, numbers simply have no basis in reality. Age matters less as shared time rewrites the math. Age gaps that felt vast in your youth offer but Continue Reading “Age Matters Less When You’re Old Enough to Know Better”