A Reflection on Voice, Voting, and the Space Between Zero and One Hundred
Long before I understood the importance of voting, I understood that voting mattered.As a child, my mother and father took me with them when they voted. I remember standing in line with them and watching other people wait for their turn. Sometimes I was with my father and other times with my mother. I didn’t understand elections, policies, candidates, or everything people had endured for the right to cast that ballot. I simply understood an unspoken message from my parents and from the people standing in those lines:
Voting was something important.
As I grew older, I began to understand why.
Perhaps that is why I have always been puzzled when I hear people say, “I don’t vote because voting doesn’t do anything.”
Lately, as I have been thinking about all-or-nothing thinking, I began hearing that statement differently.
All-or-nothing thinking is a cognitive distortion in which we view something in absolute categories—good or bad, success or failure, right or wrong, everything or nothing. There is little room for the middle.
And suddenly I began to hear that statement differently. When someone says, “Voting doesn’t do anything,” the word nothing catches my attention. Is it really true that voting does nothing, or are we measuring its value only by whether we get the outcome we want?
If my vote doesn’t produce the outcome I wanted, did it accomplish nothing?
If the candidate I supported doesn’t win, was my participation meaningless?
If change doesn’t happen immediately, does that mean change isn’t happening at all?
There can also be a little perfectionism hiding in all-or-nothing thinking. We may decide that if something doesn’t work exactly the way we hoped, then it didn’t work at all. If I vote and my candidate doesn’t win, my vote didn’t matter. If change doesn’t happen quickly enough, nothing is changing. But something doesn’t have to produce a perfect outcome to have value.
But life rarely works at 100 percent.
Neither do relationships.
Neither does personal growth.
Neither does government.
Neither does democracy.
This isn’t only about voting. I see this same kind of thinking in how we consume information.
We hear a political advertisement and repeat its claims without asking: Who created this? Who paid for it? What is their purpose? What evidence supports what I am hearing? What does the person being discussed actually say?
I have to include myself here. There was a time when I listened to political advertisements and did not research the claims for myself.
That’s why recognizing cognitive distortions isn’t about pointing our fingers at everyone else. It is about becoming aware of our own thinking.
Words can also become part of this process. We hear words such as woke, radical, socialist, antifa, left, right, liberal, or conservative, and sometimes the label becomes enough. We decide what someone represents before investigating what the word means, what the person actually believes, or whether the information we’ve received is accurate.
The label does our thinking for us.
That concerns me.
“There is an enormous amount of life—and power—between zero and one hundred.”
All-or-nothing thinking gives us certainty, but certainty isn’t necessarily truth.
So how do we begin recognizing it?
Listen for absolutes in your own language:
Always. Never. Everybody. Nobody. Everything. Nothing.
Then become curious.
Is it really everybody?
Does this really accomplish nothing?
Are these truly my only two choices?
What evidence supports what I believe?
Where did I get this information?
Have I listened to the original source?
Could two things be true at the same time?
And perhaps one of the most important questions:
What might I see differently if I allowed some gray between the black and the white?
Recognizing all-or-nothing thinking doesn’t mean abandoning our convictions. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t disagree, challenge ideas, or take a stand.
It means we should know why we are taking that stand.
Before I say nothing will change, I need to ask myself whether nothing is really true.
Before I repeat what I heard about another person, I need to ask where the information came from.
Before I allow a label to determine what I think about an entire group of people, I need to understand what the label actually means.
And before I decide that my voice doesn’t matter because I cannot change everything, perhaps I need to remember that change has rarely happened because one person could do everything.
It happened because many people were willing to do something.
I think back to those voting lines of my childhood differently now. My parents never sat me down and explained all of this to me. They didn’t have to. They took me with them. They stood in line. They waited. And eventually, I understood the message.
Your voice matters. Use it.
All-or-nothing thinking can convince us that if we cannot do everything, there is no reason to do anything. But life doesn’t happen only at the extremes. There is an enormous amount of life—and power—between zero and one hundred.
So perhaps the next time we hear ourselves say always, never, everybody, nobody, everything, or nothing, we should stop for a moment.
Not because our conclusion is necessarily wrong.
But because our thoughts deserve to be examined before they become our beliefs, our words, and ultimately our actions.
Think about what you’re thinking about.
Exhale into Life with Regina