All-eaters

This is typically a result of sloppy concepts and perfectionism. They are mostly harmless, but can be quite confusing. You try to figure out a perfect categorization for the whole universe and get seduced by some brilliant idea. Soon you find out that if you look close enough, you can put all the things in the world to this box. Strangely enough, you can often find an opposing idea and fit everything to that box too. You can learn to live with all-eaters and they can be very useful too. In fact, some all-eaters appear in this book too, such as the “content” category. The way to understand these is to realize that the problem is, again, in box-thinking. The world doesn’t come in neatly defined boxes, it’s us who put it there. We try to put shades of grey into boxes called ‘black’ and ‘white’.

Time: Past-Future

As an example of an all-eater, consider the concept of time. Organizing things on a timeline is something most of us do all the time. You might be tempted to organize everything by time in your mind maps too, but that’s likely to lead you to a few dead-ends.

Everything that you know has happened in the past. Even the thoughts you are aware of right now already happened. In this sense, there is no such thing as the future. The things that you associate with future are just past memories, too. If you think this way, you end up with one single map called Past that ends up eating everything.

The same thing happens if you consider the reasons for particular things in your maps. You can put them again all in to past (“I did this, because some event in the past”), but you can just as well find a reason from the future (“I did this because where I want to be tomorrow”). This way the future can become a similar black hole as well. There is really no way to separate those two kinds of reasoning, the past-looking deterministic and the future-oriented teleological one. Neither is the right one. Either one can be useful, depending on the context.