I hear this all the time as an excuse for the way things are, or as a reason for why someone does something: "That's just the way it is." I don't believe I've ever truly considered this a valid reason for anything. It doesn't explain anything. It's an excuse to not know and to not think. It resigns control of your life to the ether, for people who do think to decide what's right and wrong.
I was at a mall last week and I heard someone say this, word for word: "Thinking is hard." We live in a society where is has become difficult for people to think for themselves. They're not used to it! They're used to people just telling them what to do. This happens at home by authoritarian parents, it happens by teachers at school who do the work for the kids instead of having them come to their own conclusions, and it happens through peer pressure in their circle of friends. We wonder why people can't think for themselves, but then we turn around and reinforce it by telling people what's right and wrong.
Well you know what? I could easily be wrong. Everything on this blog is derived from my own personal experiences, opinions, delusions, and feelings. You don't have to agree with anything I say, and you probably shouldn't take any of it away as absolute fact. It could be used as a guide, sure, but what I say is certainly not "just the way it is," rather, it is "just the way it was for me." Everything people say is filtered through a lens of personal bias, opinion, and experiences.
When I was trying to start hormone treatment, my first doctor told me that I had to present socially as a girl for a year before I could be prescribed the medication I needed, and I needed a note from a therapist. If I had resigned and simply said "well, that's just the way it is," then I wouldn't be where I am today.
Everybody says you need a degree and a teaching certificate to become a teacher, and you need to finish college before you can land yourself in a career. I became a teacher before having a degree of any kind, thus proving that that was most certainly not just the way it is, cut and dry, end of story. We like to label things so we can definitively say exactly what something is, but it's not as simple as that. Life is a series of gray areas, not just yin and yang. I found a teaching position that didn't require any of that, proving that my degree didn't matter.
There was an episode of That '70s Show in which Eric Forman says to his girlfriend, "I have to do better than you because I'm the man, and the man's the man, and that's just the way it is." Well you know what, Eric? No, that's not "just the way it is."
I've seen people work themselves into a crippling amount of debt by buying a house and two cars they couldn't afford. They blamed life and said, "Well, most Americans are in debt, so I guess that's just the way it is." No, it's not. You could have avoided it by pacing yourself and not buying crap you can't afford. Yeah, you may have still wound up in debt, but it would at least be more manageable.
That last example does not describe everyone, obviously, because one example does not, in itself, describe an entire class of people. One example does not establish that "that's the way it is."
Christiaan Huygens determined that light is a wave, as demonstrated with the "double slit" experiment. It was well confirmed and acknowledged that "that's the way it was." But Albert Einstein discovered proof that light also behaves like particles. It wasn't as cut and dry as people believed, and this is why science isn't about trying to prove something, it's largely about trying to disprove something.
I hope that this has given someone something to think about. The next time you find yourself saying anything along the lines of "that's just the way it is," try to recognize that by saying that, you've given up on thinking. You've stopped exercising creativity, and you've just accepted something without even having an actual explanation. Just be aware that by choosing the action of willful ignorance, you have given up another piece of your own free will.
