In Praise of Beige

We seem to live in an increasingly binary world... A restaurant is excellent or terrible. Our habits are either healthy or unhealthy. The workplace is toxic or thriving. Relationship has red flags or green flags. Hell even a perfectly ordinary Tuesday can apparently be crushing it or a complete waste of time.

There isn't much room for the middle: It was fine, or: That's just how she does it, or: I wouldn't do it that way, but nothing terrible appears to have happened.

Which is why I think beige is such a useful metaphor, because beige doesn't demand anything from us.

A red flag says: Pay attention. Something may be wrong.

A green flag says: Pay attention. This is good.

A beige flag says:

You could pay attention, I suppose. But you could also make a cup of tea.

And there's a surprisingly serious idea lurking underneath the joke. We often confuse difference with deficiency. Such as someone likes more structure than I do, but that doesn't necessarily make them rigid. Someone talks less than I do, does that make them deranged?

My partner folds towels differently, is that evidence of an incompatible value system?

So perhaps one small sign of wisdom is developing the ability to distinguish between something that is wrong and something that simply isn't the way I would do it.

Yes there are some absolutes (IMO) like behaviours that hurt people, or habits that diminish our lives. Those deserve attention. But there are also an enormous beige middle: peculiarities, preferences, eccentricities, inefficiencies, contradictions and harmless imperfections that don't require optimisation.

We don't need to turn every behaviour or situation into a development opportunity.

Perhaps some things can simply be beige, and simply left to be.