My MENSA Husband's Heartwarming Letter When I Needed It Most

I grew up with the impression that there was a "right answer" for everything, that there were clear guidelines or matching lookups for applying the right rules to a given situation. The right answer was the one that "people" had agreed upon as a standard because everything runs smoother when we're doing things the same way. This concept applied to everything from courtesy to traffic rules to the dictionary meanings of words. To prevent chaos, society developed standards to determine an objective measure of what is the "right" way to do basically everything.

What I didn't realize until decades later is that this concept is essentially black-and-white thinking with a piece of shared context. But we don't really have much shared context anymore. Thanks to technology, we travel across the planet, mixing together cultures that were fine individually but constantly clash in shared spaces. Ideas are spreading faster than ever before, and we often destroy and overhaul institutions and white nations based on ideas we think we understand. But really, we were missing a key piece of the puzzle, and we don't figure that out until it's too late. There is no rulebook, or rather there are a million different rulebooks that overlap with each other in varying amounts. Sometimes they'll agree about a situation, and other times they won't, but the bottom line is that it's all subjective, and some portion of relevant persons will disagree with any given decision, and some other portion of relevant persons will disagree. "Right" is based on perspective, and people with similar perspectives will tend to have similar opinions about what that means. But all perspectives are limited; therefore, all agreement is limited. Finding that agreement is a moving target, and it always will be. It's a different moving target for everyone, so really it's a swarm of moving targets. Missing is inevitable, and not just because we're imperfect; it is because it is an impossible and inherently contradictory task. There will always be missing, and whether that miss is a "stupid mistake" is a question of perspective. What counts as stupid, what even counts as a mistake, is, in essence, subjective. No matter how hard we try to put structure to it, it's still just a patchwork of other people's opinions from different times and perspectives. And it sucks, because absent the adoption of common standards, we end up with no choice but to predict every person's perspective, opinion, and response individually, which, of course, is impossible. So we shortcut. We build probability models of others' anticipated behavior based on our own subjective interpretations of our own limited observations of other people's past responses, and this approach gets the projections wrong quite a bit, for obvious reasons.

But we keep using it because we've got nothing better to go on, especially when the standard systems we've developed are being intentionally not adopted by significant numbers of people for a variety of reasons. So we have to accept a success rate that's hopefully more than 50% but disappointingly far short of 100%, try to improve it when we can, and get used to being wrong a lot. But how can one accept being wrong when trauma history sees "being wrong" as an existential threat? One cannot. But neither can one simply never be wrong again. We can hope to be wrong differently and hope that the next time we're wrong doesn't get us killed, like a previous time nearly did.

And we want there to be fairness, an objective consistency based on common standards, so that similar choices produce similar results, not just from one time to the next, but from one person to the next. But that requires agreement and acceptance from others who have different perspectives, priorities, values, and beliefs, and usually enough agency that we can't do more than lead them to water, at least not without getting into the ethical quagmire of violating their agency "for their own good" and making benevolently intended decisions on their behalf, like that's never gone wrong before. So we're left with hoping that enough people agree to some ground rules such that the others (who refuse to follow those ground rules) are treated fairly. But fairness, also being an illusion that's based on perspective, often forces us to settle for "predictable" instead. And sometimes that doesn't even work because everything keeps changing, and we keep finding unexpected consequences of choices we thought were good at the time. Predictability ends up breaking into pieces, and groups are handled differently for reasons that don't make sense because "fairness" is an amalgam of the biases and opinions of a gazillion separate people, all flawed and not all even sharing the same value that fairness is good.

There is no right answer.

There never has been.

There never will be.

We are all just winging it, hoping that whatever pain came from being wrong before won't happen again, doing our best to anticipate problems and avoid them, with varying levels of success. We tend to believe that results are directly caused by our little piece of what happened, overestimating our control of the situation, or the control of others, constantly trying to suss out cause and effect, boiling an infinite sea of chaos down to a handful of if/then statements, but it doesn't work that way. So we do our best and hope it works out. Sometimes it does, and sometimes it does not. Sometimes the result could have been changed by our actions; sometimes, it could not. Everyone thinks they could have done better, and they're happy to tell you it's your fault. It's easy to believe them, especially when they seem to agree about it. But the reality is most people talk out of their asses most of the time, whether they're saying the same thing as each other or not. And when they think you might believe that it is your fault, they're more than happy to jump on the bandwagon because the only thing better than blaming your problems on someone else is blaming them on someone who actually accepts that blame. Confrontation and resulting dissonance avoided in one fell swoop!