The English language is immense, and there’s all sorts of ways we can put it together. – Alan Moore

Dogma is a bad word everywhere but within the Catholic Church. – Sam Harris

Categories are a way for us to make sense of the world. These are labels like “American” or “Soldier” that don’t exist the same way that something like bullets do, but they help us to digest all the information constantly streaming into our heads and also share that understanding with others.

However, reality doesn’t always fit into these neat boxes.

Take a fighter pilot for instance. If you’re like me, you might associate that phrase with Top Gun, Maverick, Chuck Yeager or traits like precision, adaptability or killer instinct. But what about a Nazi fighter pilot? Were there highly skilled Nazi fighter pilots? Of course they were, but your brain might struggle to merge those two categories together, like a computer reading a scratched disk. It’s easier to think about Top Gun.

The box of religious identity can be especially rigid and difficult to merge with other things. For example, maybe you were born Catholic. Through your genetics, and/or thousands of hours of ritualistic practice, it might feel very difficult to be anything other than Catholic. And if that religious identity is persecuted, you might feel even more responsibility to cling onto it. But is it possible to be raised Catholic and also be a Buddhist meditation teacher? Why not?

Another way our brains will simplify the world is by generalising. It’s cheaper to guess that the switch on the wall controls the light. Or that the traffic light will go green after it’s red. These heuristics are simplistic, and not always true, but they persist because of how effective they are, and how much energy they save. Deliberating through life based on individual cases, like many autistic people need to do, is much harder.

Generalising, like overly simple categories, can also narrow down our world, especially when it comes to how we think about ourselves. This was an idea explored by Richard Bandler. He noticed that for a depressive person, it wasn’t just that they were depressed but that “they’ve always been unhappy.” It sounded like an immutable fact. But with pointed, careful questions (“Are you depressed every moment of every single day?”) he would sometimes be able to ease the noun of depression into a more flexible verb like “I depress myself”.

Robert Anton Wilson was someone else who recognised the dangers of generalising. As an experiment, he invented “E-Prime”, a style of writing English without the verb “to be”. In E-Prime, rather than say “John is lethargic”, you might say “John appeared lethargic in then office today.” The second statement is honest about the inherent subjectivity (well he appeared that way to me when I saw him) and also the time and context. In E-Prime, “I am depressed”, might be truthfully transformed into “I feel sad right now at my desk.”

In reality, we’re a lot more nuanced and complex than any one label or heuristic could hope to capture. We need to remember that although the language and thoughts we rely on can be useful, when we look at them more closely, we can see that they are like rough, black and white drawings. These drawings shouldn’t be taken too seriously, lest they become tattoos.