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Generalizations: The Intellectual Necessary Evil

Generalizations are the duct tape of understanding. Crude, quick, imperfect — but without them, we'd never get through a sentence. We say "men," we say "women," as if billions of individuals are easy to summarize. Not because it's true, but because the brain craves shortcuts. Generalizations are intellectually necessary — and necessarily wrong.
 

Roles and Reduction
 

Every social interaction is an agent-arena relationship: we act, the world responds. The roles we play — friend, rival, parent, partner — aren't just surface. They shape how we’re seen, and how we see. But there's no free lunch. Roles cost energy, flexibility, and freedom. The more we inhabit them, the more they inhabit us.
 

The tragedy is, we also crave simplicity. We reduce people to types, then critique those types as if they’re real. It’s funny, until it's not. Entire ecosystems thrive on satirizing stereotypes — the man-child, the boss babe — and calling it insight. But beneath the memes, something deeper slips away.

As complexity gets flattened, meaning rots. Vulnerability becomes cringe. Certainty becomes currency. And those who actually know things? Often they hesitate. It’s not weakness — it’s wisdom. The inverse of Dunning–Kruger. Call it earned uncertainty: the more you know, the less performative you get about knowing.
 

Maybe

Maybe we don’t need to abandon generalization, just hold it gently. Patterns, not verdicts. Roles, not cages. Critique, not cynicism.

Maybe what we need is complexity with compassion — and the humility to say, "I’m still learning."

That might be enough to start.

Kind regards,
~Erik