Most of Life Is And, Not Or

Self-help writing and AI-generated text increasingly rely on a binary 'it's not X, it's Y' rhetorical formula that flattens complex truths into false dichotomies, argues psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman. Kaufman contends that most of life requires holding two truths simultaneously—such as willpower and systems, or talent and practice—rather than choosing one over the other. He warns that this pattern, which AI has learned from human prose, erodes readers' ability to tolerate nuance and should be replaced with a 'yes/and' mindset.

Artificial Intelligence /us/basics/artificial-intelligence Most of Life Is And, Not Or Self-help and AI love the binary flip. Most of reality doesn’t. Posted July 14, 2026 Reviewed by Margaret Foley /us/docs/editorial-process Key points - The "it's not X, it's Y" formula rules self-help, faking insight by flattening reality into a binary. - Most of life is yes/and: willpower AND systems, talent AND practice, held in tension rather than resolved. - The binary flip trains readers to expect a winner, eroding the capacity to hold two truths at once. - AI learned the tic from our self-help prose. Changing how machines write starts with changing how we write. “People don’t buy what you do; they buy why you do it.” —Simon Sinek “Connection is not about how much time we spend together. It’s about how much joy and meaning we create together.” —Adam Grant “You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.” —James Clear “Vulnerability is not weakness; it’s our greatest measure of courage.” —Brené Brown This rhetorical move has taken over the bestselling tier of self-help https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/self-help writing, and it’s driving me bonkers. The formula is everywhere—in a TED talk, a book subtitle, the close of a paragraph. Often it’s the entire structure of an argument: an old idea named, a new idea installed, the door shut behind it. The writer looks like someone who has Figured Things Out. The reader gets a clean takeaway. The book sells. I think it’s cheap rhetoric, and we should stop respecting it. It’s not cheap because the underlying claims are always wrong. Sometimes they’re partly right. Practice does matter https://library.scottbarrykaufman.com/uploads/2015/09/10.1002 wcs.1365.pdf more than talent in the long run. Willpower https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/self-control does have limits, and systems do help https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/543993/atomic-habits-by-james-clear/ . Identity matters more than goals https://jamesclear.com/identity-based-habits for some forms of behavior change. Tone can shift the impact of a message https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/your-wise-brain/202109/why-the-tone-your-voice-makes-such-difference . Taken loosely, each claim is defensible. It’s cheap because it pretends the world is two-positioned when it isn’t—that one thing is true and the other false, when both are usually true at once. It’s a compression device: It takes a complicated truth and swaps in the appearance of a clean reveal. The price, which readers don’t notice because the trick is so smooth, is that the real relationship between the two things gets erased. Willpower and systems both matter; they interact and compensate for each other over time. The deeper question—when willpower runs out, which systems work for which people—has been replaced by a punchline. It’s the same with the trope that it’s not talent but practice. In truth, talent multiplies the capacity for practice https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/jul/07/can-science-spot-talent-kaufman . It’s both. But that doesn’t make as catchy a bumper sticker. Most of life is yes/and. After 25 years of studying human potential, I’ve come to believe the most important things in a human life are almost always both, not either. Creative people, in the research my collaborator Carolyn Gregoire and I gathered for Wired to Create , are not focused or open. They’re focused and open, on demand. Mindful https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/mindfulness and mind-wandering https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/attention . Playful and serious. The empowerment mindset I wrote about in Rise Above https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/737413/rise-above-by-scott-barry-kaufman-phd/ is a yes/and: yes, I have suffered, and I’m still responsible for what I do next. Maslow’s later work, which I tried to update in Transcend , is a yes/and too: the lower needs matter across a whole life, and the higher needs aren’t earned by completing them. Maslow argued that the hallmark of “transcenders” is the capacity for dichotomy transcendence https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/322518/the-farther-reaches-of-human-nature-by-abraham-h-maslow/ —integrating dualities into a bigger picture that sits above the false binaries. When the binary flip becomes the dominant register, two things get lost. Readers stop being able to hold contradictions—the basic precondition for mature thought. And the debates that matter get cheapened. The real arguments in psychology—how to integrate trauma https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/trauma without collapsing into victimhood, how to honor sensitivity without pathologizing it https://hsperson.com/ , how to value optimization without worshipping it https://www.beautifulminds-newsletter.com/p/optimization-has-no-soul —are subtle and often unresolved. They can’t be summarized as “it’s not X, it’s Y.” When the genre demands that they be, the conversation flattens. And now the machines have learned it from us. That “it’s not X, it’s Y” move is now the single most recognizable fingerprint of AI writing. The Atlantic just ran a whole piece on it. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/07/ai-chatbot-writing-tic-negative-parallelism/687892/ The construction shows up about three times as often in AI text as in human text, and it quadrupled in corporate communications between 2023 and 2025. And whose fault is that? Ours. These models digested a decade of exactly this prose, and human reviewers kept rewarding the formula because it feels like insight. The machine picked up the hollow reveal from the most confident voices in the room and handed it back to us at industrial scale. We taught the mirror to talk, and the mirror is teaching us back. Which is strangely hopeful. If you want AI to write with more soul, look at what we feed it—the training data is us. So this stopped being a matter of style. How we choose to write is, in a small but real way, how we shape what these systems become. The “and” has to start with the humans. Yes/and is harder to write. It asks you to hold the complexity in your own head instead of offloading it onto a formula. It makes for longer sentences and less tidy takeaways. It doesn’t retweet as well. But it’s often closer to the truth — and in a culture exhausted by being lied to in carefully arranged ways, closeness to the truth is becoming a competitive advantage. You, the reader, can handle nuance. I’m going to stop pretending you can’t. I hope the self-help industry—and the chatbots https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/artificial-intelligence —can do the same. And yes, the irony isn’t lost on me: This essay’s title is itself an “it’s not X, it’s Y.” The formula is so baked into the language that it sneaks in even when you’re arguing against it. Caught me.