#211: The purity vortex

A new cognitive bias

This past Wednesday I published a podcast episode about sleep training, one of the most divisive parenting topics. I planned to talk about my experience sleep training Sunny, but found myself returning over and over to the nature of the division between the pro- and anti-sleep training camps. What about this topic catapults people into such extreme and opposing views? The more I considered this question the more I suspected it held answers about society generally, since the key features of the sleep conversation—passionate unbending opinions and harsh judgments of those who think differently—echo across so many debates about how to live. I’m not sure I’ve unlocked it per se, but I did come up with one explanation, a cognitive bias I’m calling “the purity vortex.”

The purity vortex comes into play primarily around high-stakes lifestyle decisions. Say, quitting your job to follow your dreams, or staying with your partner after they cheat, or moving back to your hometown, or leaving the church, or becoming sober or polyamorous or anti-vax. The possibilities are endless—the connecting thread is a big decision that asks you to set aside your hesitations (fears, doubts, uncertainties) to meaningfully change your life. In the face of these choices, we often painstakingly construct worldviews that support the choice we’re trying to make to get us over the hump of our own resistance. And we do this so well that we temporarily render any other choice ridiculous. This is a totally understandable way to operate, I think. If you’re standing on the edge of a diving rock and you want to get over your fear of jumping, you have to believe, even just for an instant, that it’s infinitely better if you jump. In this brief moment you enter a vortex of pure ideology: There is only one thing to do.

Of course, in reality, there are other options. You could decide not to jump and find power in that refusal. You could hem and haw and then retreat back to the towel where you were sunbathing. But if you do jump, the flash of certainty might stick with you. You might even become self-righteous about jumping—urging other people to jump, claiming there’s no other way to live. This is what it’s like to get stuck in your purity vortex: You’ve taken a useful tool (absolute momentary certainty in the right choice) and turned it into a weapon (ongoing certainty about the choices of yourself and others). I think this happens all the time in everyday life. It’s not just that we are trying to retroactively vindicate our choices by pushing them on other people—it’s that the choice was difficult enough that at some point we had to believe alternatives were definitively wrong, and because either the choice is still fresh or we’re not very open-minded, we hang onto this idea for too long.

When I reflect on my most daunting decisions, I can recall the life jacket of certainty I clung to in their aftermath: the belief that keeping the unexciting stable job was to deny my own potential; that staying in a relationship that was lovely but not exactly what I wanted was a form of self-denial; that sleep-training was so effective and safe that my choice to do it was the most rational and caring one I could have made. There is an element of truth to each of these, and I’m grateful for the nerve that truth gave me when I was scared to act, but over time I’ve felt these convictions soften. Sleep training is my most recent tough decision and most intentional attempt to escape the purity vortex, and it’s still a work in progress.¹ The others softened more naturally as my age and experience showed me worthwhile alternatives.

Two weeks ago, I shared a newsletter by Miranda July about divorce as a topic of discussion. July’s post featured bullet-pointed advice she’d first shared with a friend who was thinking of leaving her marriage, and now wanted to more broadly for anyone who was thinking of doing the same. She warns in the beginning that her advice is geared toward one answer only—leave—and I think this was a kind of purity vortex warning. I say that because, as I read on, I noted some telltale signs: Her statements about human relationships were firm and definitive, they seemed to be drawn from her specific experience, and her solutions for liberation were pretty prescriptive. No surprise the advice put off some people who don’t want to leave their marriages, and felt like her advice was dismissive of their reality. Her list wasn’t written for them, but by publishing it, her advice escaped containment.

I think July might be in a purity vortex about the confinement of long-term hetero monogamy, reinforced by the success of her book (which I loved) and the many women who’ve reached out to her in the aftermath about feeling trapped by their marriages or liberated by leaving them. I don’t think she’s done anything wrong in indulging that—I assume many people will continue to need a purity vortex to help them escape marriages they don’t want, and she’s given it shape—but I do think her convictions about all this will evolve with time. Or maybe they won’t, which I’d personally find a little less interesting.

The other day, I was discussing this with my friend Tavi and she mentioned one of her friend’s vortexes is being staunchly anti-having kids “because (in her own words) she had to double down on her own choice not to have them and stave off regret.” I admire the self-awareness of that, to spin a vortex on purpose and choose to stay there while understanding on some level that your certainty is less rooted in reality than in your need for peace.

It’s a lack of awareness that can grate over time, and which causes so many of us to talk past each other on matters we find important or to give each other bad advice. There’s a bit of risk in applying your experience to other people’s dilemmas too soon, like telling people to buy a particular pair of jeans just because they looked good on you the first time you wore them. I’ve made this mistake plenty of times, especially in my twenties. But our choices need time to be challenged a little, so that we can incorporate what we’ve learned into a richer, more complicated view.

“Part of the problem,” Tavi said, “is talking about big decisions as changing your life in one way, permanently and finally, even though life keeps going and things change again.” I’ve always appreciated this about the passage of time, how it recasts the past, shedding new light on old decisions and shifting our perception in the process. In moments of crisis, the pull of a purity vortex is strong, and for good reason—it enables us to take leaps that never before felt possible. But I think stepping out of the vortex holds just as much promise.

My favorite article I read last week was “In Dark Times, What Is the Artist’s Role?” a fascinating conversation between Jessica Nordell and Elif Batuman, especially in the latter half. Friday’s 15 things also included an incredible old show, an ayahuasca diary, my favorite top I finally bought in a second color (after a year), and more. The rec of the week was workout clothes that aren’t just spandex.

Hope you have a nice weekend,
Haley

Cover image via Getty | Laura Hedien

1. I talk a lot more about all this in the episode!