Nuance and Complex Minds

My new book, Trust Your Mind, is out on May 6th. It has been a *long* labor of love through controversial waters, intense interpersonal dialogue, and fearless speech from notable writers, professors, teachers and many more. It would mean the world to me if you placed a quick order here, and we’ll celebrate in May.

Trust Your Mind tells the story of the widespread self-silencing that has taken hold, both online and in our daily interactions, and explores the psychology of groupthink, how to tear yourself away, and how a handful of leading thinkers are trailblazing a new path forward for every complex, questioning, intense thinker out there. We’re a rising tide, and it’s time to let it all to the surface.

As folks of all stripes here know, it’s painful to see layers that others won’t talk about. And every day we’re faced with narratives at work and in the media that tell us to fit each other into boxes. If you’re like me, that hasn’t sat well for a while now, even if the original intentions were solid. Now it feels like we’re constrained to those boxes and no one is allowed to defy them.

For our mental health and for our democracy, we all need to be allowed to voice complex insights and raise questions that feel scary to ask. Otherwise our conversations grow stale, our neighborhoods lose vitality, and our collective culture feels boring and flat.

Let’s bring back rowdy discourse, direct communication, and giving each other the benefit of the doubt.

In a nutshell, from pop culture to our current political moment to our own relationships at home and at work — it’s time to go beyond labels to actually unearthing all the inner worlds of complexity and nuance and layers of deep insight and overlapping threads of information and ideas and swim through it all with gusto and exuberance and joy and deliberation and encouragement and fearlessness.

If you’re just as excited as I am about the coming revolutionary wave of nuance trampling over simplistic talking points, please pre-order my new book to send a message to bookstores, publishers, news outlets and more that we need way more nuance, not less. Trust Your Mind will be delivered to your door on May 6th if you pre-order today. My heart is forever grateful for your support. 

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A few other quick items: a new article on embracing disagreement, why I lost a handful of followers, and the rise of a promising young musician. 

Here’s my new piece in UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center featuring research on “conversational receptiveness,” including practical tips. My new book is less than six months away and you’ll be hearing a lot more from me on conflict, disagreement, free speech, and the need for all of us to unleash our inner complexity amidst so much dumbing down of our intellects. 

On that note, I shared the following tweet and lost a bunch of followers — indicating exactly why we all need to up our game for not only appreciating nuance but urgently teaching what it means to be a nuanced thinker and escape the pull of groupthink and whatever your tribe is telling you. 

On the subject of complexity and identity, Jessie Murph is getting me through these strange times — she was just nominated for a Grammy and her unapologetic encapsulation of so many cross-sections of identity is basically a mouthpiece for my soul. She’s a melodic country rapper who echoes Dolly Parton and Amy Winehouse, and I feel like she could be my cousin (in fact she looks exactly like one of my cousins). 

Thanks for reading — feel free to chime in with your nuanced comments, and looking forward to more nuancing with you all soon.

-Jenara