Embrace Meh

In getting to a better understanding of the shared reality, the closer and also the more distant you look the more you can’t really define anything in life via a binary.

What about good and bad? Well first of all most things are neutral or meh. Most things are just fun or functional or useful or not. The lines between them are often labeled as a moral division, but usually upon closer inspection they are a cultural distinction or just an opinion. Very few things in life really cross the line to where they need a moral distinction, and those distinctions are going to vary based on those exact cultural influences.

What about night and day? That seems pretty binary, right? That doesn’t take into account twilight. Or leaving Earth entirely. Once you are in space the notion of night and day is one that no longer has to apply to you. So even night and day are less of a binary than they seem. Hmmm.

I was raised in a Christian society where things were explained to me as right or wrong. Everything went into one box or the other and as I grew and changed my thinking some things would move from one box to the other. Now I am trying to change my thinking again to remove the boxes entirely, unravel the binaries where I find them. Usually while I do this I find that the binaries only pointed out differences that didn’t matter to me anyway. They were arbitrary at best and hurtful at worst. I don’t need them anymore.

I embrace meh instead. Meh is the idea that most things in life just are. Most people in life are just doing their thing, they don’t have an agenda, they are not trying to change the world. Some are of course, but most are not. It’s not a morality thing at all. It is ok to just live your life.

I do not deny that there is real good and evil in the world. Contrary to what my cultural upbringing taught me most things do not fall into those categories, I don’t need to search for the right thing to do, or look for the evil in things I don’t like. Most of the time there is no right thing to do, just options, and most times my dislikes are a matter of opinion. Applying morality is inappropriate.

As I have started this work on myself, I have so much less stress. My feelings run away from me less. I spend less time defensive, less time judgemental. I create a safer space for my own odd existence. I also found counterintuitively, that I have more space for doing good, validating the effects of evil so I can stop contributing to it, and just peace. Once I stopped looking for a judgement that wasn’t there I got to use my personal judgement to decide where I want to put my support and energy, and where I wanted to draw my boundaries. Meh has been more peaceful than I imagined life could be.