Grey.

There’s not much I miss about the old days. Truly. I try to embrace change and recognise that all evolution is necessary and inevitable. I don’t have spare energy to fight the inevitable so I’m always looking to find the positive in new developments, new things, new people, new ways.

Social media has to be one of the most polarising developments of the last few decades. Love it, hate it, bored by it, addicted to it - however you feel about it you have a relationship of some sort with it. My relationship with social media is pretty intense. I make my living from it which means that I’m on it for most of my working day. Many of you may think that’s a terrible thing, but the fact that it’s my job has helped me compartmentalise it a bit. Instead of being in an office for 8 hours a day, I’m on Instagram.

But my love affair with social media isn’t all roses and hearts. There’s been a devastating consequence of social media that makes me sad every time I see evidence of it. In some ways, it’s true, social media has brought us together. It’s founded communities (a bit like this one) and it’s given people support when they believed they had none. But it’s also made life black and white. It’s removed the nuance. There are no grey areas left.

Before social media, we relied on polite conversation to get us through the day and into new relationships whether they were romantic, platonic or professional. There were boundaries that we didn't cross because we understood the need for privacy and respected people’s right to make their own choices. I remember as a child, my father telling me very clearly, that it was rude to ask who someone was going to vote for. Why? Because it was, frankly, none of your business.

But those boundaries have gone and social media has a large role to play in that. Face to face, we’re still generally nice to each other. We don’t say horrible things to people’s faces, we don’t start fights with them and we respect the social conventions of human interaction. We may go off and vent about a person or a conversation or an experience in the safe space of our home or our best friend’s front room, but rarely do we resort to confrontation in real life. In fact, most people do everything to avoid it.

As well as that, there used to be an understanding that two things could be true at the same time. For example, my father is a Conservative. He’s voted Conservative all his life and he’ll continue to vote Conservative until the day he dies. I hate the Tories and Boris Johnson and every last single one of the cunts (excuse me) but does that mean that I have to hate my dad? No. Do I have to agree with his politics? Also no. Does that make him a bad dad? Not at all. Does it make him a bad human? A flawed one perhaps (in my opinion), but not a bad one.

I know lots of you will disagree - because this is what I see happening all the time. My father is a Tory and therefore he’s a terrible person. Just because there’s one part of someone that you don’t agree with doesn’t intrinsically mean the whole person is disagreeable. Of course, I’m only using my father as an example (and he’s not even on social media) but the point remains: the grey areas have gone.

In pigeon holing us so rigidly into ‘this’ or ‘that’ and in making it so easy to confront, fight, attack with little or no consequence, social media has deleted all the 'spaces in between’. It’s removed the sacred place where discussion takes part because progress isn’t about one idea prevailing over another; progress is about compromise, mutual respect and discussion. If there’s no room for discuss and no space for compromise then we will be forever stuck in a cycle of aggression.

This is heavy for a Tuesday morning and longer than my normal letters but let me leave you with this: this is a big idea but scale it down. Who have you written off because of one thing they did or said? Or one element of them that offended you? Who do you bitch about (and we all do it to some extent) because of something that you don’t like about them? Is there a situation you’re in that you’re potentially being too black and white about?

To be clear: not for one minute am I suggesting you let toxic people back in or put yourself in situations that you don’t want to be in. Instead, I’m suggesting that maybe we could all be more open to the nuance, to appreciating the grey areas.