I’ve spent most of my life between two languages, and I only recently understood what that has cost me — and what it’s given me.
I grew up speaking Hungarian, in a language that wraps itself around complexity. Hungarian doesn’t let you be definitive in the way English does. There’s room for doubt in the grammar itself, space for the listener to meet you halfway. Metaphors aren’t decoration; they’re how meaning actually travels. The language assumes context, assumes a listener who will bring their own understanding to what you’re saying. It’s a language built for nuance.
As I became more fluent in English, something began to shift without my noticing.
English is a precise language, and I loved it for that. I could be clear, analytical, efficient. I could describe things with exactness that Hungarian’s poetry sometimes obscured. In English, I found a voice that felt more confident, more capable of taking apart an idea and laying it out clearly. I could say what I meant without the soft hedging that Hungarian seems to invite.
But there was something I didn’t notice I was losing until much later: the ability to hold two things at once without forcing them into opposition.
What I See Now
I pay attention to what happens on social media — partly professionally, partly because I’m curious about how people think. And what I see, increasingly, is people in rooms talking only to people who already agree with them. They’re not listening to understand; they’re collecting ammunition. Every sentence from “the other side” is evidence of stupidity or malice, never just a different frame of reference.
It would be easy to dismiss this as surface-level polarisation — the usual complaints about social media bubbles. But what actually troubles me runs deeper. I watch people I know to be thoughtful, intelligent, fundamentally decent become unreachable because they’re terrified. Terrified of being wrong, of changing their minds, of being attacked if they say something that doesn’t fit neatly into an approved position. The fear is palpable.
And I watch what happens to anyone who tries to speak from a place of genuine nuance: they get flattened. Called fence-sitters. Told they’re part of the problem. If you acknowledge that there might be a legitimate concern on both sides of something, you’re complicit. If you point out that extremism is dangerous on any end of the political spectrum, you’re “both-sides-ing” a situation where one side is clearly right.
What truly frightens me is that there seems to be no way to disagree without being forced to choose a side completely, without staying fragmented. You have to choose a side completely, or you’re nothing. The middle ground — where most complex reality actually lives — has become a place where you can’t stand without being attacked from all directions.
And I’ve felt the pull of it myself. I’ve wanted to just pick a lane, stop trying to explain the texture of things, stop wasting energy on people who won’t listen anyway. There’s a relief in binary thinking, I understand that now. It’s less lonely, somehow, to just commit fully to one story about how the world works.
The Prison We Don’t See
Last week I was talking with a friend — someone caught in this exact thing. She’d expressed a view that didn’t align with her social circle, and the response was swift and total. She was labeled, dismissed, no longer fully trusted. What stayed with me, though, was watching how she’d started to interpret her own thoughts differently. The nuanced view she’d held was now something to be ashamed of, something to hide. She’d begun to police her own thinking before anyone else could.
She said something that has stayed with me: “It’s like I’m in a prison, but the prison is made of my own fear of what people will think.”
And I thought: yes. That’s exactly it.
We talk about polarisation as if it’s something happening to us — as if social media algorithms or political extremists are forcing us into corners. And yes, those things are there. But there’s another part of the story, the part that feels less like blame and more like understanding: we’re choosing the prison because the alternative — sitting with uncertainty, holding complexity, risking misunderstanding — requires a kind of emotional and psychological strength that we’re not taught we need.
We’re not taught it because nobody named it as a skill. We’re taught to think critically, to analyse, to form opinions. But we’re not taught how to be when we’re thinking critically — how to regulate our nervous system when confronted with ideas that threaten our sense of safety or identity. We’re not taught that you can’t think clearly from a place of fear. That binary thinking is what your brain does when it’s scared. That the only way out is to calm down first.
What Language Was Trying to Tell Me
A few years ago, I was on a walk — which is where the real thinking happens for me, away from the distraction of trying to think — and I realised something about my two languages that I’d never quite articulated before.
When I think in Hungarian, I’m in a different relationship with complexity. The language itself assumes that things are layered, that context matters, that what you mean can’t always be said directly. The grammar reflects this: there’s room for uncertainty built into how you form a sentence. You have to account for nuance. It means the listener has to meet you halfway — they can’t just passively receive meaning. They have to make meaning from what you’re saying.
When I think in English, I’m drawn toward precision, toward naming things exactly. English wants you to say what you mean clearly, without ambiguity. It’s a beautiful precision — but it comes with an assumption buried deep in the language itself: that things are basically separable, categorisable, distinct from one another. If the word exists in English, it means the thing itself exists as a discrete entity.
English’s precision — the way it wants you to say what you mean clearly, without ambiguity — is one reason it thrives as a global language. You don’t need shared background knowledge to understand someone speaking English. You can say something and it lands cleanly.
But that precision comes with a hidden cost: it trains your mind toward binary categorisation. Research on language and cognition — what’s called linguistic relativity — has shown that the language you speak actually influences how you think, how you perceive, what categories feel natural to you. It’s not that language determines thought completely, but it shapes it measurably. And English, with its emphasis on explicit precision and categorical clarity, nudges us toward thinking in polar opposites.
This only became clear to me because I can feel it when I switch languages. When I think in Hungarian, nuance emerges almost without effort. There’s room for contradiction, for “yes, and also.” But when I think in English — especially under pressure, when I’m trying to be clear and efficient — I feel myself drawn toward either/or. Toward the kind of thinking that divides the world into clean categories.
Add to this what psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist has been documenting for decades: that Western culture itself has gradually become dominated by left-hemisphere thinking — the kind of thinking that’s analytical, focused on detail, that breaks things into categories and sees the world as objects to be manipulated. Meanwhile, the right hemisphere’s way of seeing — which holds context, relationships, the whole picture, the irreducible complexity of things — has been gradually sidelined. We’ve built an entire culture around left-brain ways of knowing, and we’re shocked to find that we can’t think our way out of polarization using the very mode of thinking that creates it.
So you have a double squeeze: a language that linguistically invites binary thinking, and a culture that has elevated left-brain categorization as the primary mode of understanding. No wonder nuanced thinking feels like swimming against the current.
Why People Get Trapped (And It’s Not Stupidity)
The polarisation we see online and in politics isn’t really about people being stupid or malicious. I think it’s closer to this: people are scared, and their nervous systems are doing exactly what nervous systems do when they’re frightened. They’re narrowing their focus, searching for threat, protecting their tribe.
Research on polarisation shows that group identity is a powerful force — far more powerful than actual disagreement on specific issues. Once we’ve joined a group, our brains start to work differently. We see things the group sees, we become emotionally invested in the group’s survival, we interpret ambiguous information in ways that support the group’s narrative. This is tribalism at work — ancient, deeply rooted in how humans survive together.
But here’s what we shouldn’t forget: our brains are wired to seek out content that feels safe and validating, especially when we’re stressed or anxious. Social media algorithms exploit this by rewarding us with engagement on polarised content — which is why it’s so hard to resist. Our nervous systems are literally being trained to seek out the binary, the extreme, the certain. Because certainty feels safe. Complexity feels dangerous.
Which means that critical thinking — real critical thinking, the kind that can hold opposing ideas and sit with uncertainty — requires something that nobody’s really teaching: emotional regulation. Nervous system calm. The psychological and emotional capacity to tolerate the anxiety that comes with complexity, with not-knowing, with holding multiple truths at once.
Rollo May, the existential psychologist, wrote about this. He argued that anxiety isn’t something to be eliminated — it’s actually the signal that you’re free, that you’re taking responsibility for your own thinking. The problem is that in a culture that teaches us to fear anxiety, we’ll do almost anything to escape it. Binary thinking offers an escape route: if you’re just certain, if you just commit completely to one story, the anxiety goes away. You belong to a group. You know what to think. You’re safe.
But you’re not actually safe. You’re just imprisoned by your own certainty.
What We Actually Need to Learn
If I could redesign what we teach in schools, I wouldn’t just teach critical thinking. I’d teach what has to come first: how to be in your own body when you’re uncomfortable. How to regulate your nervous system when you’re scared or angry. How to tolerate the anxiety that comes with genuine thinking.
Because here’s what happens in therapy, if you’re paying attention: people don’t change their minds through argument. They change their minds when they feel safe enough to think. When their nervous system has calmed down enough that the prefrontal cortex — the part that does actual thinking — can come back online. When they’re no longer in fight-or-flight mode, imagining enemies, defending against threat.
Most of us are walking around in a low-grade fight-or-flight state, and we don’t even realise it. Our shoulders are tense. Our breath is shallow. We’re ready to defend ourselves. And from that state, you can’t actually think. You can only react.
But when someone feels genuinely understood — not agreed with, just understood — the nervous system settles. The mind becomes available again. You can hold complexity because you don’t need to defend against it anymore.
This is what I’d want to teach: the psychological and emotional prerequisite for real thinking. How to be with yourself and with others in a way that doesn’t require collapsing everything into safe categories.
The Quiet Rebellion
What strikes me about people who can hold nuance, who can sit with complexity without needing to collapse it into binary — is that they’re often quietly isolated. They don’t fit neatly anywhere. They’re not right-wing enough for some people, not left-wing enough for others. They annoy people on all sides because they won’t commit fully to the tribe.
But I think this capacity — to think across boundaries, to hold multiple perspectives, to stay curious about where people are actually coming from rather than just seeing them as examples of their category — might be one of the most important things we need right now.
It’s not comfortable. It’s not safe, in the way that group belonging is safe. It requires emotional maturity, and it requires patience, and it requires a kind of courage that doesn’t look like courage because it’s not aggressive. It’s the courage to stay thoughtful when everyone is trying to pull you toward certainty.
I think back to Paustovsky, the Russian writer whose autobiography I’ve been reading. He was a person who could hold his era and his country and his own doubts and hopes all at once, without flattening any of them into simple narrative. He wrote about a time of enormous political polarisation, and what he did was pay attention. To textures. To the complexity of people. To the way meaning works beneath the slogans.
That’s the thinking we need.
An Invitation
If you’re someone who finds yourself between things — between languages, between political frameworks, between the stories people want you to tell about yourself — you’re doing something much harder than most people manage: thinking without the safety of certainty.
The world you see — the texture of it, the contradiction, the way everything is more complicated than the headlines suggest — is what real perception looks like.
And I think we need more of this thinking. We need people who can stay curious when it’s easier to join the tribe. Who can listen to understand rather than to win. Who can hold the anxiety that comes with complexity without collapsing into binary certainty.
It’s lonely sometimes, this way of thinking. You’ll be misunderstood from all sides. You’ll be called names. You’ll be told you’re not committed enough, not angry enough, not certain enough.
But you’re also free. You’re not imprisoned by other people’s stories. You can think your own thoughts, ask your own questions, make your own sense of things.
And maybe, if enough of us stay in that uncomfortable middle ground, that’s where real change starts — by creating space for other people to think.
If You Want to Explore These Ideas Further
If the language/cognition connection intrigues you, Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary is the foundational text — dense but rewarding. His more recent work, The Matter with Things (2021), is even more comprehensive.
For understanding how anxiety and freedom intersect, Rollo May’s The Meaning of Anxiety (1950) is still the best place to start. It’s philosophical but deeply human.
Irvin Yalom’s Existential Psychotherapy (1980) is the clinical bible for understanding the four givens of existence — if you want the rigorous version.
And if you want something pure and beautiful on paying attention to complexity and nuance, Konstantin Paustovsky’s autobiography, The Story of a Life (various English editions available) shows you what it looks like to live this way.
The research on polarisation and group identity is scattered across journals, but the work by Stefan Thurner and colleagues at the Complexity Science Hub (published in PNAS, 2025) provides solid evidence that polarization is measurable and real — and linked to how our social networks have changed.
