The colour of disagreement

It’s a given that we tend to gravitate around people who share our values and views, and that we tend to like those who – to our eyes – are more similar to us in their beliefs or those we aspire to be, hence it is not a total surprise that when someone disagrees with us, we might feel hurt, annoyed or even outraged. Having said this, I do think that we need to learn to see things in shade of colours rather than taking or expecting extreme positions (the black or white approach) and attach judgement to situations we are not living directly or people who don’t share our views.

The part that I settled on is that it is much easier to go to extremes (‘you either like me or you don’t’ ‘you either agree with me or you don’t’) than accepting the fact that often we can still like one another in most parts, but disagree on a number of things. We can also change our mind on things that we might have had a certain opinion on before, and that that, does not make us less trustworthy, morally unsound or inconsistent but, quite the opposite, it makes us human.

Photo by Diogo Nunes on Unsplash