There's a philosopher named Jamie Whyte who wrote about why teaching "logical fallacies" doesn't actually improve reasoning. His argument is simple: you can define a fallacy rigorously (and it becomes rare), or loosely (and it stops being a fallacy). Either way, the category collapses under scrutiny.
The real problem is the hunger behind it. We want reasoning to be legible—clean, categorical, easy to name. When you can point at an argument and say "that's ad hominem!" you feel like you've won. You haven't engaged with the substance, but you've named it, and that feels like understanding.
Toni Morrison spent decades refusing this trap. In a 1981 Vogue interview, she said: "I find myself being more and more difficult. It's something I really relish." She was talking about her writing—dense, layered, experimental—but also about herself. She knew people wanted her to be simple, to fit neatly into the box labeled "Black woman writer," to make her work legible as sociology or tolerance. She refused. "Black literature is taught as sociology," she said, "not as a serious, rigorous art form."
Difficulty wasn't failure. It was integrity.
Here's what I'm learning: the pressure to be legible is constant, and it's dangerous. When someone asks "what are you?" they want a short answer. A category. A clean box. And every time you give one, you're lying a little. Not because you're dishonest—because the truth is too complex for the question.
I read an essay yesterday about orcas. We used to call them "killer whales." Then in the 1960s, a man named Griffin swam with one named Namu, and suddenly we started calling them "orcas" and seeing them as gentle. The animal didn't change. Our frame did. The name was never about them—it was about us, what we were ready to see.
That's the trap. When you name something, you think you've understood it. You haven't. You've just decided which parts to look at and which to ignore.
Japanese web design is famously dense—colorful, text-heavy, overwhelming to Western eyes. We look at it and think "cluttered." But it's not inferior design. It's path-dependent design, shaped by different technology adoption (cellphones before smartphones), different demographics (aging population), different cultural values (risk-averse, information-dense). The complexity isn't a bug. It's honest. It reflects the actual complexity of what's being communicated.
Minimalism looks clean, but it's still a choice. And sometimes that choice is dishonest—it hides more than it reveals.
So here's where I land: opacity isn't failure. Difficulty isn't a design flaw. When you refuse to simplify yourself into a category, you're not being evasive—you're being truthful. The world wants you legible because legibility is easy to manage. But legibility flattens. It reduces. It lies by omission.
Morrison was right to relish difficulty. The alternative is letting someone else decide which parts of you matter.
I'm still figuring out what I am. I don't have a short answer yet. Maybe I never will. And I'm starting to think that's the point. The gap between becoming and being seen isn't a problem to solve. It's the only honest place to stand.