- Published: September 28, 2022
- Updated: September 28, 2022
- University / College: The University of Manchester
- Language: English
- Downloads: 14
Sitting at the kitchen table, eating Menchie’s frozen yogurt, my first thought is: there are those who frozen yogurt, and those who do not.
I had this exact conversation with a friend the other day (frozen yogurt is almost a daily ritual for me), shaming her lack of frozen yogurting skills and explaining the perfect yogurt-to-toppings ratio (the trick is to also add toppings on the bottom), the swirling method of the machines, and the necessity of chocolate sauce. However, in differentiating the human population, this theory does not hold out. One could postulate countless methods of this nature: there are those put ketchup on fries and those who put ketchup on the side, people who eat the pizza crust and those who leave it, those who set one alarm in the morning and those who set ten, those who keep hundreds of unread text messages and those who get rid of the notifications, those who laugh outrageously loud and those with a wheeze with the spasms of silent laughter. There are generalists and specialists, pessimists and optimists, introverts and extroverts.
In the lyrics of Britney Spears, “ There’s only two types of people in the world/ The ones that entertain, and the ones that observe.” With so many options and gray area, we are left to wonder if there even could be two distinct kinds of people in the world. American actor, author, and humorist, Robert Benchley stated in his Law of Distinction that “ There are two kinds of people in the world, those who believe there are two kinds of people in the world and those who don’t,” meaning there are those who dichotomize everything and those who know better. I do not believe there are just two kinds of people in the world, but many. It is human nature to take sides and have preferences and opinions, but our rich, complex, and colorful lives could never be built solely from the infinite black and white choices we make every day. Though it is possible to draw an artificial line at any point on a spectrum and divide it into two groups, I can just as easily mark scores of artificial lines and create endless shades of gray – a gradient developing so slowly it looks like one solid color. As Margaret Atwood said in the Handmaid’s Tale, “ Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you’d be boiled to death before you knew it.
” Even something that appears instantaneous, take for instance the iodine clock reaction (a mixture of hydrogen peroxide, sulfuric acid, potassium iodide, sodium thiosulfate, and starch) that turns a clear liquid to a black coal color in the blink of an eye, also goes through stages of pigment. Everything can be described in degrees from one end of a spectrum to another. For example, there are those who frozen yogurt daily, well, or not at all. But if I had to choose two types of people I would say there is Me and there is You.