Yes or No? Long or Short? Left or Right? Let’s face it, our ability to call it one way or the other has been seriously eroded. Commitment phobia has pervaded all areas of life. Decisiveness is dead. Ambiguity rules. The answer to most things these days is, “It Depends”. We have even coined new acronyms like VUCA to camouflage the fact that we can’t seem to make up our minds.
It’s probably not a recent thing though. The “Middle Way” is a big thing in Buddhism. Not surprisingly then that, in the land of The Buddha, it has pervaded our lives to a point where we try to land in the everything in the middle.
I remember my initiation to the middle path decades ago, during a visit to the saloon as a boy. Those days, my being at the saloon was an event of some material relevance with the barber having to put in some honest work to earn his keep. Unlike nowadays, when the poor chap fiddles around with his instruments, chatting about the world hunger problem and generally killing time to save me the embarrassment of being done in about 35 seconds. But I digress…
The one thing I vividly recall from that day is the barber asking me the key question – “Short or Long?”. Even as my tender brain froze in inaction, I remember my dad chiming in authoritatively – “Medium Short please”. And without batting an eyelid, the barber delivered a Medium Short haircut. This lesson has stayed with me ever since. Whenever you’re give an option to choose from A or B, always go for something in between. And to understand how widespread this malaise is, just google “Medium Short” and you’ll get 2.8 Billion hits!!!
Sometimes, the middle thing is hard coded to the point where it’s the only option. If you ask for a Dosa in Tamil Nadu, by default you get what is called a “Special Saadhaa”. For those who are unfamiliar with Tamil, Saadhaa means Ordinary. So, you are essentially ordering a Special-Ordinary Dosa. Which is a happy compromise, I think . Imagine if your waiter was asking you to choose between an ordinary Dosa and a special Dosa. Your mind will be collapsing under the implications of making the choice, the consequences of the choice being wrong, and just the general discomfort of taking a position.
The recent wave of political correctness is further addling our brains to the point where even when nature creates a binary, we overrule it by creating a continuum. So when life gives us two genders, viz., male and female, we go and create, according to Google, a spectrum with as many as 5 new genders in between!!
Deal with it – across the board, decisive binaries are being dismissed as fringes and the middle muddle is getting mainstreamed…
This strange reticence has infected the corporate world as well. I remember an important directive from our HQ in USA during my younger days. “From now on, we have to be prudently aggressive” – read the missive. As can be expected, this left most people scratching their heads in absolute bewilderment. How do you go about the task of being simultaneously prudent and aggressive? How do you fire up a team in a sales conference by exhorting them to be prudently aggressive?
But not falling in line with this new direction, or worse, calling it out, could be a career derailer. In the next performance review you would be branded as “too simplistic”, “unable to deal with nuances” or some such deadly corporate sin, with disastrous implications for your climb up the hierarchy. So whenever a colleague asks you how you feel, you learn to reply, “Aggressive. But prudently so…”.
Similarly, during my days in the world of investing, we went through a phase of being “cautiously optimistic”. Which, I’ve been told, is distinctly different from being “optimistically cautious”!
The dictionary pegs an oxymoron as a combination of contrary words that give rise to a phrase with a distinct and a different meaning. Not the case here. This drift to the middle is just a mixture of contrary words that ends up meaning nothing to anyone. Like a calming “All-of-the above” option. A cop out, basically.
Today we even have medium dark (did you know there’s an emoji in that color) and medium tall (that’s actually an apparel size!). Tough love is the preferred parenting approach and we’re constantly being advised to make haste slowly. According to some of my liberal friends, India has stopped being a democracy, though we have not yet become a dictatorship; we’re now an electoral autocracy. And in your workplace, I bet you’ve been in many a meeting where the boss sagely proclaims that the answer probably lies “In Between”? Such a cool, safe and wise thing to say, despite the pointlessness of it…
When you order food and are offered the choice of “Spicy” or “Less Spicy”, what are the chances you say medium? Is it any wonder that Medium-sized Pizza is the largest selling size in India? And when the waiter asks you if you would like soup, isn’t a “one by two” or a “two by three” soup such a soft landing spot between the two extremes of having a soup and not having one!
In fact, it is so pervasive that there is actually a scientific name for this phenomenon called Central Tendency in the field of market research, where survey respondents shy away from answering either “Agree” or “Disagree” and tend to take solace in the rather tame “Partially Agree” or “Partially Disagree” options most of the time! And don’t even get me started on how much people seem to love the “Neither Agree nor Disagree” response!
And here’s a true story; over time I have, through a random sequence of events, accumulated three tennis rackets with weights 260 gm, 280 gm and 300 gm. No prizes for guessing that the 280 gm racket is the one I use most of the time! I think it has very little to do with my comfort with that particular racket. It just happens to be the one in the middle. I’m sure if I had 3 rackets of weights 280, 300 and 320 gm, I would have used the 300 gm one the most…
Things have reached a pass where only two questions remain in the contemporary era with the capability to evoke binary responses. The first is, “Is Modi a Karmayogi or a Feku?”. The second is, “Does the beard make Rahul Gandhi a more effective leader?”.
In an age where nothing is purportedly black and white and where the shade of grey is the only point of contention, being specific and decisive seems passe. Nowadays, the key conclusion at the end of almost every meeting is “let’s mull this over”, as if some deep cosmic issue is at stake. And why not? Mulling is cool. Far cooler than if you actually decide and end up being wrong! Who needs that kind of aggravation?
This is now a phenomenon which has solid and deep roots and it’s probably best to just go with the flow. No point agonizing. I would advise an approach of optimistic fatalism to deal with it; if that doesn’t work for you, perhaps a change of tack and a dose of fatalistic optimism will bring you some peace…
Anyway, I’ve said my piece. You may agree (very unlikely). You may disagree (also very unlikely). Or you may both agree and disagree with me (virtual certainty). Mull over it…
