Escape From The Binary

Assume a world of binary and everything is either good or bad. This sounds simple, every time I do something it’s either good or bad.

What makes this a bit more emotional involved is, when things are good you have so much to gain and millions of benefits. But when things are bad, not only do you experience something quite horrible — you also lose out on the good that you WOULD have had, had you gotten the good result.

It’s like this story called Parable of the Plank. All you have to do is walk across a plank from one end to the other. This is easy peasy. You don’t even have to think about it.

But suppose now, the plank is on a 1,000 meter elevation and on the other end of the plank is a winning pension lottery (this is a Korean lottery where you don’t win one winning sum but a lifetime pension).

Binaries / dilemmas may be simple in a cognitive perspective, but they are not as simple as that from an emotional perspective. We like to think we are mostly rational creatures but our day to day is mostly driven by our emotions.

Given these two facts… 1) You’re most likely living inside of a binary and 2) your experience inside binaries are always stress-driven, it makes sense you would feel:

• Lethargic

• Drained

• Paralyzed

• Afraid

• Unsure

… among other things.

What if there is no bad choice? You’re at a free lunch paid for by your work and you’re at a buffet. I know that the mind is so powerful, you can even optimize for the best meal at a buffet. But for the sake of simplicity and illustration let’s assume that all choices at the buffet are equivalently good.

Then there is no real risk, there is no real gain. You would just eat whatever you feel like eating. Me personally, I’m a chow mein kind of a guy and I’m a sucker for noodles at buffets.

How do we get to that state where there is no bad choice? We have to understand that bad is a contextual quality. I break my leg after a nasty fall and that seems bad compared to not falling. But what if I narrowly escaped a certain death by pivoting and breaking my leg? I’d much rather have a broken leg than death.

There is nothing about breaking my leg that’s inherently good or bad. It depends on context, perspective. This is a simple thing to illustrate when we are discussing things that are not close to us.

For example, black beans or pinto beans at a Mexican restaurant? At that point, they’re different beans. But when compared to coleslaw vs. beans, they’re both beans. When compared to coleslaw / beans vs. ribeye, all of the former are side dishes and the latter is an entree.

We call something something depending on the context. Again, this is easy to see outside of your life. But what if I told you there is nothing about your childhood or upbringing that’s good or bad? What if I told you a traumatic incident that happened to you is neither good nor bad? This is when the internal resistance kicks in and people start shutting their ears off.

This is a quality of the mind we must understand. There is a certain line where if an argument crosses it, people automatically close their eyes and start being angry. This is not because we’re stupid, this is not because we’re doing something wrong. It’s an innate human tendency.

So we cannot confuse the reality of defining quality by context vs. an event in my life having definitive quality. In reality, both are defined by context but our human tendency interferes in alternative interpretations of our lives. We resist what one might call gaslighting.

But the more we are able to identify the reality of quality by context in action, the more we get to observe it in our lives as well. I was fired from my job once. At the time it was the worst thing that could have happened to me. But through the passage of time and multiple instances of observing how one bad event could be good and vice versa, I’ve learned how to re-interpret the story of my life.

Let’s fast forward a little bit. With this ability to observe things flexibly, what opportunity arises from your life? Well, to funnel you into a specific answer a little bit, this allows you to be more “experience-favoring” instead of “risk-averse”.

Every action you take gives you a certain set of experiences. The great thing is, these experiences are learning opportunities. The more you accrue experience, the more well informed you become both in terms of knowledge and wisdom. Luckily for you, by this point you know what this feels like because in order to have a flexible mind you need to have a lot of experience in interpreting experiences differently.

I’m quitting my job soon. This will be a different experience from living a life with a job. It is not bad, it is not good; it is a different experience. With this experience I will learn what the difference is when it comes to having a stable, fixed income vs. a random, variable income.

I will also learn how to become a more committed YouTuber and a content creator. I will also learn how to live in a different continent. I may have a period of time where I’m not used to the money I’m newly making. I will have to learn how to live with a new health insurance and take care of medical needs without a job.

And in the end, I may have to take a job given some circumstances. I may have to return to software engineering again, since everything is an open book. But if and when I do return to a job, I will have a new perspective on having a (software engineering) job because I learned so much about NOT having said job that I wouldn’t have known otherwise.

For you too, the possibilities of life are available. But you are less likely to explore all of your possibilities if your perspective is warped by a false binary of good or bad that doesn’t exist in reality. Take your good or bad and practice seeing the differences outside of the good and bad; note the bad from the good and good from the bad. With repetition, your outlook on life will greatly change.