March 18, 2026
It's Complicated
An essay expressing opinions and judgements require more than simple cursory refelction or research.
2 min read
It’s complicated.
We use this phrase a lot in my family when discussing decisions to be made, current events, or others’ situations. It’s our shorthand for a crucial reminder: most things aren’t as simple as they first appear. Understanding someone’s background and environment is essential to making sense of their choices and circumstances. And if we don’t possess a full understanding of someone’s background then we might want to hold off on any judgment of their choices or circumstance.
It feels like this is a new phenomenon where many people today expect most decisions and topics to be binary in nature. Is this due to our digital age since the mid-90s, when 1s and 0s became the basis for much of our education, jobs and economy?
I wonder if this is simply the outcome of a slow societal burn from our news and entertainment choices. News and opinion shows on cable TV insinuate that there are only two sides to a topic. Political campaigns reduce complex issues to three or four word slogans. Public discourse defaults to binary options: black or white, red or blue, pro-gun or anti-gun. Together, these forces may have conditioned us to see nuance as unnecessary.
Books offer what digital media cannot; they allow complex ideas to breathe. They create an opportunity for depth and a level of detail that allows nuance to flow. Perhaps the real issue isn’t that we lack intelligence, but that modern technology erodes our capacity for sustained focus.
Binary frameworks are seductive: they make it easy to identify allies and enemies, and to form opinions without much research. Memes are efficient at spreading ideas, but they cater to our instinct, not our intellect. Most real issues live in nuance and demand more.
In the end, even with this idea…it’s complicated.