Life is Painted in Shades of Grey. And That’s What Makes It Real.

People love to believe this myth—that life is just a series of choices where everything can be split into “and” or “or”.

That things are clear, clean, simple: right or wrong, win or lose, good or bad. We build stories around black and white. We crave the comfort of certainty, the mental handrails of clarity.

But that’s not real life. Not even close.

The truth? Life is only “and.” Life is painted in the grey.

In fact, it’s more like purple—a messy mash-up of sides, a blur of colours, tensions, contradictions, and paradoxes.

And people hate that.

We want to know where we stand, to have clear rules. But the world laughs at our need for simplicity. It gives us mess. It gives us tension. It gives us grey.

Why We Cling to Black and White

If you want to see the collective anxiety of our age, just look at how desperate people are for black and white answers.

You see it in politics—left or right, red or blue (cue the upcoming Australian Federal Election). You see it in culture wars, in the way people stake their identity on “I’m for this, I’m against that.” Scroll through any social media feed. See how quickly a nuanced opinion gets shouted down, how often people demand to know: “Are you with us or against us?” Like the universe is a big chessboard and you need to choose a side, black or white.

Why do we do this? Because certainty feels safe. It reduces our anxiety. If the world is clear, then we don’t have to wrestle with the weight of ambiguity, with the pain of not knowing, not being sure, not being in control. We want categories and quick answers so we don’t have to sit in the discomfort of “I don’t know.”

But, honestly? It’s a lie. A crutch.

The world is not black and white. It never was. The more you try to force it, the more reality will break your fingers.

The Intellectual Life: “And,” Not “Or”

Look at any deep intellectual pursuit—philosophy, science and literature. What you find isn’t certainty. It’s complexity.

Philosophy has spent thousands of years wrestling with the fact that most of the biggest questions are riddles with no clean answers. What is truth? What is good? What is the self? Is there free will? Read Plato, Kierkegaard. They circle around uncertainty like moths around a flame. Kierkegaard talks about the “leap of faith” precisely because you can’t reason your way to certainty.

Science, the great hope of the modern era, is just as grey. Every scientific breakthrough opens new questions. Newtonian physics worked, until it didn’t. Einstein smashed it with relativity.

Now, quantum mechanics sits awkwardly with relativity, and no one can fully reconcile the two. The deeper we look, the fuzzier the picture gets. Science lives in the grey. The process is literally called the “scientific method” because you’re always testing, always revising, always failing forward.

And literature? Great novels don’t give you heroes and villains—they give you characters, with flaws and contradictions and heartbreak. Shakespeare didn’t write tragedies where the bad guys lose and the good guys win. He wrote Hamlet—paralysed by indecision. He wrote Macbeth—destroyed by his own ambition. Grey everywhere.

Business and the Startup Grind: Living in the Grey

If you’ve ever started a business, you already know the lie of black-and-white thinking. Startups are born in chaos. You begin with an idea—a flash of certainty, maybe. But within weeks, reality punches you in the face. The market doesn’t care about your clean plans. Customers don’t behave in neat, predictable ways. Competition pops up where you least expect it.

Every startup pivots. Every founder faces the moment where they realise: “We’re not building what we thought we were building.” The greatest business success stories are case studies in muddling through, failing, adjusting, iterating. Steve Jobs got kicked out of his own company before he returned to lead Apple’s greatest innovations. Airbnb was rejected by investors dozens of times. Twitter started as a podcast platform. Shopify was a snowboard store. They survived because they lived in the grey—they were able to hold ambiguity, to say “and” instead of “or.”

Leadership in a startup isn’t about having all the answers—it’s about living in the questions.

Are we on the right path? Are we burning too much cash? Is this the team I need? A good leader knows you rarely have enough data. You live in doubt and keep moving anyway.

You have to develop a stomach for uncertainty, a kind of mental callous.

Certainty is a luxury you don’t have.

Real World Example: Netflix

Remember when Netflix was a DVD rental company? The entire business was built on mailing physical discs. But the world was changing—streaming was coming. Reed Hastings could have doubled down, could have insisted on the old model (black and white). Instead, Netflix went grey.

They built a streaming service while still running the DVD business. For a while, it was both—messy, expensive, uncertain. They got mocked for the “Qwikster” fiasco, made expensive mistakes, lost customers. But they kept moving in the grey, and eventually, it paid off. Now they’re one of the world’s largest content creators.

If they’d demanded black-and-white clarity, they’d be dead.

The Uncomfortable Truth: It Never Gets Easier

There’s a story we tell ourselves: “Once I figure it out, once I hit that next revenue target, then I’ll have certainty. Then life will be clear.” But the finish line never arrives. You grow up thinking adults have it all worked out. But the adults are just muddling through, too—pretending they’ve got the answers, when really they’re living in a world of "trial and error" like everyone else.

From the moment we learn to walk, we learn by failing. You don’t stand up and run; you wobble, you fall, you get bruised. But you keep going.

Life is “grey” from the very beginning. You don’t get handed a manual, you get handed a world of ambiguity and told to figure it out. The most successful people are the ones who don’t let the fear of grey stop them.

AI: A Mirror for Human Ambiguity

Even the most advanced artificial intelligence isn’t about binary answers. In fact, AI lives in the probabilistic. AI models, don’t “know” things with certainty. They weigh data, make predictions, assign probabilities. Every response is a reflection of a thousand greys—a distribution of likelihoods, not a single black-or-white truth.

Want to see a computer struggle? Give it a moral dilemma.

Ask it to choose between two valid but conflicting options. Suddenly, it’s in the grey, just like us.

Even the so-called “machine learning revolution” is built on ambiguity, nuance, and error rates. There’s no perfect answer, just better or worse guesses. In a way, AI is just a high-speed version of what all humans do—muddle through, try, fail, iterate.

Why the World Hates the Grey

So why do we keep resisting it? Why do people fight so hard to make everything black and white? Because it’s scary.

The grey is where mistakes happen. It’s where you make a call and might be wrong. It’s where you risk being judged, or losing, or looking foolish.

It’s more comfortable to pick a tribe and stick to it. To find an “enemy” and make them the problem. To filter the world so only the things you want to see get through. But it’s a comfort that comes at a cost. Black-and-white thinking breeds extremism, reduces creativity, makes people defensive and closed. It’s easy to feel “right” when you refuse to see the complexity.

But you pay for that comfort with your own growth. When you close yourself off to the grey, you close yourself off to learning, to real connection, to progress.

Living in the Purple: Practical Ways to Embrace the Grey

If you want to actually succeed—at work, in life, in relationships—you have to build a tolerance for ambiguity. Living in the grey and the purple (red and blue make purple) calls on you to get comfortable being uncomfortable.

And here's how to live in it:

1. Admit what you don’t know. It sounds basic, but it’s huge. Stop pretending. The moment you say “I don’t know, but I’m willing to find out,” you open the door to growth. In business, the leaders who own their uncertainty (and actually step into it) are the ones who attract the best people.

2. Ask better questions. Stop looking for quick answers. Start asking more interesting questions: “What am I missing?” “What’s another way to see this?” “What’s the risk I’m not seeing?” Every great decision is the result of asking, not assuming.

3. Surround yourself with “grey thinkers.” Build teams that challenge you. Hire people who don’t always agree with you. Read widely, especially from people you disagree with. Your thinking only grows in the tension.

4. Reflect often. Take time to pause and examine your own motives. Are you craving certainty, or are you seeking truth? The two are rarely the same.

5. Celebrate learning, not just winning. In startups, the most valuable stories are about the pivots, the failures, the moments when the plan didn’t work but the team grew anyway. Make that part of your culture.

Examples in Action

• Startup Pivots: Slack started as a gaming company. Now it’s a workplace communication tool worth billions. Even one of the most successful startups I was part of, pivoted four times before they found product-market-fit. They didn’t know what they were building until they saw what didn’t work.

  
  

• Personal Growth: Most people don’t “find themselves” in a lightning bolt moment. They stumble, try things, fail, learn, and keep moving. You discover who you are by living in the mess, not by waiting for the clouds to part.

  
  

• Relationships: Love isn’t black and white. You can love someone and still get frustrated, still be disappointed, still struggle. Real connection is about leaning into the grey, even when it’s awkward, even when it hurts and seeing what the result is, good or bad.

  
  

• Even AI Ethics: The biggest debates about AI are about grey areas—privacy vs. convenience, freedom vs. safety, bias vs. neutrality. The AGI company I was interim-CEO for during it's startup phase taught me that; every new technology is a negotiation, a balancing act, not a simple “good or bad.”

  
  

  

The Courage to Stay in the Grey

There’s an odd kind of heroism in admitting life is grey. It takes guts to stand in the middle, to resist the pull of the extremes, to say “I don’t know” when everyone is screaming for certainty.

It’s easier to join a side and defend it to the death. It’s harder to hold both truths at once. To say, “This is true, and so is that.” To say, “I’m still learning.” To say, “I’m both confident and uncertain.” That’s the posture of a real leader, a real adult.

The next time you feel the itch to make life black or white, pause. Ask yourself: Am I looking for the truth, or am I just trying to feel safe? Am I open to the mess, or am I just reaching for comfort?

Remember: The greatest things in life—creativity, innovation, love, growth—only happen in the grey. Only happen when you’re willing to risk, to be vulnerable, to learn, to admit you don’t have all the answers.

To End: You Only Grow in the Grey

From the moment you take your first steps, to the day you make your last call, life is a long walk through ambiguity. We fall, we get up, we try again. It is in the uncertainty. And that’s not a flaw in the system—it’s the whole point.

Business, art, technology, love, even just surviving another day—they all require you to live in the purple, the grey, to muddle through the colours, to find beauty in the mix.

So embrace it. Learn to love the grey. That’s where real life happens. That’s where you grow.

TK