Still dreaming in black and white — the tyranny of tidy opinions

We are endlessly sorting. Every political affiliation, every consumer choice, every online utterance gets fed into a vast digital machine that categorises us into tribes. Good and bad. Left and right. Ally and enemy. The promise was that if we just sorted ourselves correctly, clarity would follow. It has not.

The internet, particularly the social web, is a poor simulator for life. It is an arena of flattened consequences and amplified certainty. It rewards the tidy opinion, the unambiguous stance, the clean narrative. This is the intellectual equivalent of fast food: it is satisfying for a moment, but it offers no real nourishment. It trains us to dream in black and white.

Life, however, keeps stubbornly refusing to be sorted. It arrives in full, dissonant colour. You can believe a company has exploitative labour practices and still rely on its service to run your own small business. You can hold a deep political conviction and find yourself agreeing on a key point with someone from the ‘other side’. You can love a person dearly and be endlessly frustrated by their choices. These are not failures of principle. They are the texture of being alive.

This gap between the digital ideal and lived reality creates a peculiar kind of vertigo. We have been conditioned to believe that holding two opposing ideas is a sign of hypocrisy. That ambivalence is weakness. So we tie ourselves in knots, trying to rationalise our own internal contradictions into a neat, presentable package. We perform our opinions, hoping our chosen tribe will approve. Exhausting, isn