Drawing the Line

Drawing the line between what I like and what I don’t. This is a personal attempt to sort through something complicated.

As we grow into adulthood, we start seeing the world through filters built from all the knowledge and experience we’ve picked up along the way, without even noticing it happening. We try to balance ideals with reality, letting things pass through layers of common sense, morality, values, identity. And on top of that, we’re shaped by external forces we never had any control over in the first place. All of this can make things feel even more tangled than they need to be.

After a while out in the world, we build up the ability to handle all kinds of situations. But at the same time, we can’t help picking up a slightly jaded way of looking at things. Maybe that’s necessary, to some extent, for surviving in society. But somewhere along the way, without realizing it, those same instincts start to tie us down.

I thought I’d made my peace with it, accepted things as they were. But a quiet sense of unease kept creeping in. Something felt off.
Of course, making decisions based on ideals and principles built from experience isn’t wrong. I know that.

But lately, I’ve been trying to see things through a different lens. A simpler one. And that’s what I mean by “what I like” and “what I don’t.” Just sorting things into those two categories, and looking at them again from there.
It’s almost embarrassingly simple. But I think I’d forgotten this basic instinct — the one that was probably there from the very beginning. These days, when I need to decide something, I go back to that first instinct as much as I can. Like it, or don’t. That’s the line.

I used to tell myself the world is complicated, so it can’t be helped. But maybe it’s actually me — piling up reasons, one after another — who’s been making things complicated all along. Maybe it really can be this simple. Of course, not everything can be decided this way. But I don’t think this is a bad line to draw.