"It Doesn’t Make Sense!" — Or Does It?
Why Lack of Context Is the Root of Most Confusion (and Why That Doesn't Make You Wrong)
Discussion provided by NotebookLM
We’ve all been there.
You’re staring at a decision, a policy, a trend, or a behavior that seems utterly baffling. It doesn’t just seem suboptimal—it looks like it was crafted in a fever dream. Your gut reaction: “This makes no sense.”
But here’s the catch—it almost always does. You just can’t see how yet.
When things appear senseless, it’s rarely because they’re born of pure chaos. More often, it’s because the person trying to make sense of them is missing critical parts of the picture. What feels like madness is often just a coherent response to a broader, more complicated set of circumstances—a set you might not be privy to.
This doesn’t mean you're stupid. It doesn’t mean the decision is good. It just means the logic is hiding behind a door you haven’t opened yet.
And that door isn’t always easy to spot. Context doesn’t announce itself. It lives in subtext, in history, in systems and motivations we don’t always have access to. It’s easy to forget that many things we now understand once baffled us, too. We’ve all changed our minds about something—politics, parenting, faith, art—because we encountered new information or a new angle. What was absurd became clear. What was nonsense became, if not right, at least rational.
This is why some people become apologists, not in the sense of excusing everything, but in the older sense of seeking understanding. They want to know what others don’t see. To find the throughline. To ask: What if this isn’t as foolish as it looks? What if there’s a frame I’m missing?
Even with big, difficult ideas—like religion, or political conviction, or complex institutional behavior—there’s almost always an inner logic. Christianity, for instance, may seem illogical to some at first glance: a crucified savior, grace over merit, invisible faith shaping visible life. But from within its frame, these things follow a structure of redemption, covenant, and purpose. You may not share the belief, but once you have the frame, the pieces stop looking random.
The point isn’t to agree. The point is to see more clearly.
If you don’t yet understand something, it’s not a sign that you’re incapable. It’s just a sign that there’s more to learn.
The Illusion of Absurdity
It’s natural to believe that our own perspective is complete. After all, it’s ours. We collect what we see, hear, and experience, and form opinions based on that stream of information. But that stream is always limited. The mind, like a camera, can only frame so much at once.
When we encounter something that doesn’t fit that frame—an inexplicable decision, an alien cultural practice, a convoluted piece of bureaucracy—we often label it irrational. But what we’re really experiencing is a mismatch between our available context and the full reality. We’re judging a puzzle without all the pieces.
This is the source of much human frustration—not just interpersonally, but intellectually and culturally. People throw up their hands in the face of tradition, religion, or foreign policy decisions that seem utterly impenetrable. But if you were raised in that world, trained in that system, or shaped by that trauma, you might find it not only coherent, but inevitable. Context functions like gravity—it pulls everything into a pattern, even if you can’t yet see its center.
Take, for instance, a confusing medical billing policy. To the average patient, it seems designed to obfuscate and frustrate. But within the context of hospital funding models, insurance negotiations, regulatory compliance, and legacy systems, the logic—however frustrating—begins to show. Still maddening? Absolutely. But also not as random as it appeared.
Or consider a set of religious practices that seem strange or outdated from a modern Western point of view. Dismissed in isolation, they might look like pure ritualism. But within a tradition’s internal logic—its view of sin, covenant, identity, and the sacred—they form a coherent, even necessary, whole. Understanding doesn’t require conversion. It simply asks for perspective.
Confusion is rarely about the thing itself. It’s about what you’re not seeing—and what assumptions you’ve brought with you that might be too small for the room you’ve just walked into.
Missing Context Isn’t the Same as Missing Intelligence
To misunderstand something complicated is not a mark of low intellect—it’s a reflection of incomplete inputs. But many people internalize that confusion as failure. They think, If I don’t get it, maybe I’m just not smart enough.
That’s not the case.
The truth is, intelligence isn’t the ability to instantly understand everything—it’s often the humility to admit what you don’t yet know and the curiosity to keep asking why. Understanding requires access to the right context, and not everyone has that access. Context is not a given; it must be learned, shared, uncovered. A person may be brilliant and still be in the dark if they’re navigating unfamiliar terrain.
Think about the legal system, corporate hierarchies, technical jargon, historical precedent, or even generational slang. So much of what people do only “makes sense” if you understand the pressures, habits, incentives, and language shaping their decisions. Without that? It’s all noise. And the problem with noise is that it disguises itself as nonsense—when in truth, it’s just a signal you haven’t decoded yet.
This is especially true in emotionally charged or politically complex situations. People often mistake disagreement for misunderstanding. But many disagreements aren’t about values—they’re about vantage points. Two intelligent, informed people can look at the same situation and draw opposite conclusions—not because one is right and the other is wrong, but because they’re standing in different places, with different information, histories, and assumptions.
What looks like a contradiction often becomes a dialogue when the full context is made available. And the person most willing to pause, listen, and map out the terrain is often the one who understands the most—not because they started smarter, but because they were patient enough to learn.
"Ah, Now I See"—But That Doesn’t Mean You Approve
Once the missing context becomes visible, a strange thing happens: you begin to get it. That doesn’t mean you suddenly like it. It just means the internal logic clicks into place. What once looked like reckless improvisation now reveals itself as a calculated—if imperfect—response to prior constraints or assumptions.
Think of it like watching a movie that begins in the middle. For the first twenty minutes, nothing adds up. Characters act erratically. Motives seem inconsistent. You might even be tempted to walk out. But then, a flashback reveals a key event, and suddenly, it all falls into place. The story didn’t change—you just finally caught up to it. The context was always there; you were simply watching from the wrong chapter.
In real life, the same principle applies. An ideological movement, a religious tenet, a corporate decision, or even a personal reaction may feel completely dissonant—until you glimpse the prequel: the formative experience, the historical injustice, the underlying belief system, or the carefully nested incentives. Like a code that only runs in its native environment, many actions only reveal their logic within their proper framework.
But this clarity doesn’t imply approval. Understanding how something works is not the same as endorsing it. A bad idea can still be internally consistent. A terrible policy can still be the product of rational actors responding to bad incentives. Logical does not mean laudable. In fact, some of the most harmful outcomes in history were chillingly logical within narrow systems of belief.
Recognizing the structure behind the act equips you—not just to critique more precisely, but to respond more constructively. It lets you say, "I see how they got here" and still insist, "But they shouldn’t have gone this way." It’s the discipline of separating the explanation of a thing from the evaluation of it.
The Danger of Narrow Frames
When we fail to recognize the boundaries of our understanding, we risk drawing confident conclusions from shallow analysis. We assume people are acting stupidly, maliciously, or arbitrarily when they may be operating under pressures or principles we simply don’t perceive. This kind of narrow-framed thinking feels decisive in the moment but often turns out to be premature. It creates caricatures of people and systems that are far more complex than they appear on the surface.
We all like to think we see the big picture, but in truth, most of us only ever hold a corner of the map. The rest is filled in by assumptions, social cues, personal experience, and—far too often—misunderstanding. When we react strongly to something that strikes us as senseless, it’s worth pausing to ask: What might I be missing? What story preceded this one that I didn’t hear?
Consider:
* A manager implements an unpopular rule—perhaps they’re responding to a legal liability that hasn’t been made public.
* A community rejects a proposed policy—not out of ignorance, but because of previous harm inflicted by something similar.
* A political figure makes a baffling compromise—possibly to secure a larger, invisible objective negotiated behind closed doors.
* A faith tradition clings to a practice that seems strange to outsiders—possibly because it’s been a pillar of identity through generations of persecution.
In each of these, the surface reaction may be, This is nonsense. But widen the frame, and you may see the scaffolding that explains it. You may not agree with the result. It still may be wrong. It still may be harmful. But now, you know why. And knowing why equips you to speak more meaningfully—not with blanket dismissal, but with a kind of surgical precision that only deeper context makes possible.
Curiosity Before Judgment
The alternative to assuming madness is to ask better questions. What pressure would make someone do this? What fear is this response protecting against? What rule, precedent, or belief might be guiding this? Instead of starting with, "What’s wrong with this person?" or "Why would anyone do that?"—we begin with, "What would need to be true for this to make sense?"
This subtle shift in questioning changes everything. It invites investigation instead of accusation. It assumes the presence of an internal logic, even if that logic is flawed, outdated, or built on questionable foundations. By asking better questions, we create room for people—and ideas—to reveal their fuller stories.
This line of thinking doesn’t just lead to insight—it leads to empathy. You stop seeing the world as filled with villains and idiots, and start recognizing it as a messy, interlocking system where people are trying, failing, and reacting within the frames they’ve been given. It doesn’t mean you have to like their choices. But it does mean you can trace their outlines, understand the logic, and see the shape of their thinking.
And this is where true understanding lives—not in agreement, but in attentive curiosity. Empathy doesn’t erase accountability; it simply contextualizes it. It gives you the tools to challenge ideas with knowledge, not caricature.
This doesn’t mean we excuse everything. Some actions, once understood, become even more damning because their internal logic reveals something colder or more self-serving than ignorance alone could explain. But others are clarified, if not redeemed, by the context that surrounds them. Judgment without curiosity hardens into cynicism. Curiosity before judgment opens the door to wisdom.
Final Thought: Sense Isn’t Sanity
Just because something can be explained doesn’t mean it should be accepted.
It’s possible to understand a system and still want to overhaul it. It’s possible to trace the logic of a decision and still demand better outcomes. The goal is not to wave away all criticism in the name of context—it’s to aim it more precisely. To make our judgments sharper by first making our understanding deeper.
Because most things do make sense—just not always the kind you want them to.
Thank you for your time today. Until next time, stay gruntled.
