Categories

Human beings are obsessed with boxes.

We like things labelled, sorted and filed away neatly because ambiguity is exhausting and most of us have enough trouble remembering where we left the car keys.

Reality, unfortunately, keeps producing continuums.

Light was one of the great scientific irritations. Physicists spent centuries demanding to know whether it was a wave or a particle, as though the universe had a legal obligation to tick one box on the form. Waves were waves. Particles were particles. Nice solid Victorian categories. Then quantum mechanics arrived and light effectively replied, "Depends what you're doing with it."

That was not the answer anyone wanted.

Sometimes light behaves like a wave. It interferes with itself and produces rainbows. Then it abruptly starts behaving like a stream of particles smashing electrons out of metal like microscopic shotgun pellets. The categories themselves turned out to be incomplete. Reality had quietly wandered off while the scientists were still labelling the drawers.

Even the rainbow is cheating. We talk about colours as though they are distinct things. Red. Orange. Yellow. Green. But there is no actual line where red stops and orange begins. Nature does not install borders. Humans do. We stare at an uninterrupted spectrum and start naming regions because otherwise we'd spend all afternoon in B&Q debating whether the bathroom should be painted "Sunset Coral" or "Tuscan Apricot".

And once you notice this tendency, you start seeing it everywhere.

Politics now functions almost entirely through categorical collapse. Are you left or right? Patriot or traitor? Woke or fascist? Modern political tribes cannot tolerate spectral positions because nuance performs horribly online. Somebody saying, "Well, this issue contains competing pressures and trade-offs" will be flattened instantly by a man with a Union Jack avatar screaming, "ANSWER THE QUESTION."

Take the endless debate about whether Trump is fascist. The internet demands a box. Yes or no. But reality is more awkward than that. Trump does not fit neatly into classical fascism as a coherent ideology, yet he clearly rummages through parts of the authoritarian toolbox whenever useful. Both sides are convinced their box is the correct one. Reality, meanwhile, sits somewhere awkwardly between the shelves.

And then there is my GT6.

I have umpteen boxes of parts for it. Electrical. Interior. Engine. Suspension. Trim. That at least is the theory. In practice, opening any given box resembles an archaeological dig conducted by somebody with attention deficit disorder.

The electrical box contains relays, certainly, but also two bonnet catches, what may be part of a door mechanism, three unidentified brackets, and a bolt that looks as though it came off agricultural machinery during the Attlee government.

Now, according to me, these things do not belong in the electrical box. They are categorically not electrical. But clearly the person who originally filled the boxes operated under a different philosophical framework. Perhaps the criterion was merely, "small metal things I found near the wiring loom."

And it never ends. Every few months I rearrange the shelves in the garage in pursuit of some glorious final system of categorisation that will supposedly bring order to the universe. Sanders here. Drills there. Paint equipment on that shelf. Electrical testing kit over there.

This lasts about three weeks.

Then some object appears that is not quite a drill, not quite a sander, and not entirely clear in purpose. It may polish. It may grind. It may remove rust. It may, for all I know, prepare cappuccino. Suddenly the entire classification system starts wobbling because reality has once again produced a thing that sits awkwardly between the boxes.

And that is the point. Categories are not laws of nature. They are human convenience systems. Another person creates different boxes entirely. One man's "electrical components" is another man's "bits that were on the same shelf at the time."

The internet has made all this dramatically worse because algorithms reward certainty. Nuance spreads across social media with all the speed and grace of a wardrobe falling downstairs. Certainty, meanwhile, races around the world in under a minute carrying a flamethrower.

So we keep trying to compress continuums into categories because categories are easier to weaponise, easier to administrate and easier to store mentally.

Reality, meanwhile, continues behaving suspiciously like my GT6 garage shelves. Full of awkward objects that refuse to stay obediently in the box somebody assigned them to years ago and which, if thrown away in frustration, will almost certainly turn out to be absolutely essential six months later when fitting the driver's door seal.