The Paradox of Human Nature

You know what's annoying? If I ask you a question and you give me fourteen possible answers. Nuance can be infuriating. JUST TELL ME THE GODDAMN ANSWER!!

Ambiguity aversion is perfectly normal and natural. It has evolved within humans for millions of years. We still have some peculiar remnants, like when we catch a glimpse of a stick on the ground and instantly recoil thinking it's a snake. In the year 2015 should we really be so frightened of snakes? Human/snake encounters are exceedingly rare in the everyday life of the average suburbanite, and they're basically never deadly. But, still, it's an instinct. Better safe than sorry. Better to recoil in fear and avoid the literally infinitesimal chance that our life is in danger than to come up with a list of fourteen possibilities of what it could be and how to proceed.

As far as I can tell, there is only one capital T Truth: everything changes. Literally everything is in motion; to see it only depends on your point of view. That boulder in the back yard may have been sitting there for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years, but it's in motion. It's sitting on this planet that is spinning furiously on its axis, which is speeding around the sun, which is running around the Milky Way, which is flying through the Universe, etc. Even inside the boulder things are in motion: electrons whizzing around protons and neutrons. Quarks and shit. There's a lot of motion in that boulder.

So, change is an inevitable constant, yet we humans are hard-wired to see things in black and white. Kinda sucks, huh? Of course, we can work on it. Look at this improbable society we've built! It's fucking ridiculous! I'm writing this right now on a computer on the 17th floor of skyscraper. We've managed to cooperate with each other to such a degree that we've built computers and skyscrapers! Apes can't do that shit. You have to look to the insect world to get close to that level of cooperation.

Despite our hard-wiring we can change. In fact, we WILL change. We have no choice. So fuck our hard wiring. I say embrace it, know it's there, honor it, and move on. Some things will be much more difficult than others, but nothing is impossible.