Absolutism and Nuance

Among many of those who go in search of answers to Life's Big Problems — as well as to personal understanding of our place in life — there's always the risk of falling into what I call "absolutist thinking."

What I mean is... we've come upon some answer/explanation that seems to basically coincide with most of what feels to us to be true, and so we fall into this habit of using this "canned explanation" as the rationale behind pretty much everything that happens to us.

In few places is this more evident than the field of psychology and mental health, where we have a huge number of different disorders and syndromes to choose from... and people will pick up on one and then end up totally identifying with it. Or they identify somebody else in their life with it, like it somehow explains everything.

I've been interested in psychology and The Human Condition pretty much since my University days — which is 40 years ago, ugh! — and if there's one thing I've learned along the way it is that we can seldom count on just one single "box" to fit everything that makes up who we are.

It would be a bit like being in a medical specialty field and saying "well, the reason you have a runny nose is that you have a cold... end of story, case closed." When, in fact that runny nose could be behind anything from having a cold to chopping onions to having allergies to something outside. What's more, sometimes multiple conditions come together to provide an explanation for something.

It is in that latter instance that absolutist thinking starts to become dangerous because we try to attribute a wide range of scenarios to a single cause.

These days ADHD — which I happen to be afflicted with — has become very "trendy" and one of the things I keep bumping into are people who insist that pretty much everything in their world is happening "because they have ADHD."

Well, I can pretty much guarantee you that is not true!

But is it actually dangerous to think thusly?

Maybe not outright dangerous but you do tend to get stuck in a pattern where you do yourself a disservice by glossing over what might be a serious problem by trying to fit everything inside your singular definition.

While I may have ADHD, there are lots of quirks and challenges in my life that have nothing to do with the condition, and it would be foolish to claim a connection!

And yet, people do... all the time.

So what's really going on?

In many cases, it's actually a kind of emotional laziness or fear that wells up in people. Laziness, in the sense that there's comfortable "sleep" in just attributing everything to a single source, and there's a fear associated with the genuine work required to uncover deeper issues that might not show us from our "prettiest" side.

Typically, the more you learn about something, the more you come to understand that it's just part of a greater picture... not the whole picture.

So... remember to look at all the angles and nuances!

Thanks for stopping by, and have a great remainder of your week!

How about YOU? Have you ever fallen into absolutist thinking? What was the situation? Why were you so certain... and did you turn out to be right? Leave a comment if you feel so inclined — share your experiences — be part of the conversation!

(All text and images by the author, unless otherwise credited. This is ORIGINAL CONTENT, created expressly for this platform — Not posted elsewhere!)

Created at 2026.04.01 00:48 PST
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