The Online Rant

Our lives are filled with contradictions. We believe all kinds of things, and use those beliefs to justify our standards and actions. But usually we won’t apply those beliefs to every situation or aspect of our lives. Just the ones we feel comfortable with.

Sometimes we even believe things that are contradictory in themselves. Beliefs that can’t both be true, but that make us feel better. We just refuse to face the logical conclusion of those beliefs. Why? Because then we might have to change, or accept a truth we don’t like.

I fully understand this mindset, because I do it myself nearly everyday. It’s something we all do. We don’t think about the contradictions in our beliefs. Because as long as we don’t think about them, we don’t have to confront those contradictions.

But what happens when you are forced to confront that contradiction? Do you examine the beliefs and resolve the contradictions? That is what we should do, but most of us rarely do that.

Most of us go on the defensive. We like our contradictory beliefs, and we want to hold on to them. We start avoiding the person or situation that is forcing that confrontation. We do our best to hide from it because as long as we hide from it we don’t have to deal with it. We stick our heads in the sand and pretend not to notice things we would rather not notice.

Other times, we go into attack mode. We demonize the thing that causes the confrontation. If the person, organization, or situation can be painted as evil, then we can justify avoidance. So we discredit the thing that is causing the confrontation. We don’t deal with the contradiction, we attack whatever is bringing that contradiction to light.

Too often I fall into the avoid or attack patterns when I’m forced to confront a contradiction in my life. Most of the time I don’t even realize I’ve fallen into one of those patterns. I’m so used to it that the response is almost instinctive.

When I started to write this, I was going to give some examples of contradictions I’ve found in my own life. But I don’t think I will. I don’t want to be the thing that forces a confrontation of your beliefs. Mainly I don’t want to invoke one of the responses I mentioned in this post. I’d rather you just thought about contradictions on your own.

That’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to try to find and deal with the contradictions in my life now. Rather than waiting for a confrontation. And I’m going to try to keep in mind my tendency to avoid or attack when I am confronted. Hopefully I can do better at this than I have in the past.

Found the above comic on xkcd. It seemed so relevant that I just had to post it here.
How often have you waited to respond to an email or to post on a blog, because you didn’t have anything interesting happening in your life to post or email about?
Often, I’ll get a personal email from someone and I won’t answer it for a while. Not because I don’t want to answer it, or because I don’t have time, but rather because I can’t think of anything interesting to say. I don’t want to write boring or short messages. So I wait until something happens in my life that I can write about. Since a huge portion of my life is the Internet, that makes it kind of ironic. Doesn’t it?