Upside-Down Wisdom #18: The Illusion of Sides
“There are two sides to every story.”
“There are two sides to every story.”
It sounds fair.
Balanced.
Reasonable.
A thoughtful nod to empathy.
A reminder to consider other perspectives.
And a favorite phrase of people who don’t want to take a side on group texts.
But here’s the thing:
That’s still upside-down.
Because it assumes the story has sides.
As if life were a courtroom drama or a football match.
Yours or mine. Hero or villain. Right or wrong.
But real life isn’t that tidy.
It’s less “Law & Order,” more “Whose Line Is It Anyway?”
The moment you divide the world into sides, you stop seeing what’s actually happening—
and start seeing through the lens of contrast.
The mind loves sides.
It wants clarity. Simplicity. Labels.
So it draws imaginary lines and drops everything into bins:
Good. Bad. Us. Them. Red. Blue. Conservative. Liberal.
But those bins?
They’re just the brain’s filing system.
A shortcut.
An attempt to make sense of a world that refuses to be sorted.
Because the truth is:
There aren’t just two sides.
There are moods. Memories. Misunderstandings.
Plot twists. Perspective shifts. And at least three people misquoting the original argument.
The more tightly you hold to “your side,” the more you miss what’s actually true.
Peace doesn’t come from picking the right side.
It comes from realizing the sides were made up in the first place.
Here’s today’s Upside-Down Wisdom:
There aren’t two sides to every story—just a bunch of thoughts in costume, pretending to be the truth.
This is Upside-Down Wisdom—a series where we flip the script on the conventional "wisdom" we've been taught. If you would like to read other posts in this series, please visit the Upside-Down Wisdom page.