"It is what it is." — Is it, though?

Keith and Gerren open a new arc on the phrases we use to shut conversations down — and the systems that benefit when we do. It is what it is. Boys will be boys. That's just how it works. Common sense. Every one of them functions as a permission structure: a way of accepting a condition without ever inspecting whether it's actually inevitable, or whether we've just been told it is.

Gerren lays out the three-part framework: the stuff we don't want to think about, the stuff we don't want to be responsible for, and the stuff we don't want to change. Keith names the tension — sometimes "it is what it is" is legitimate cognitive load management. And sometimes it's just laziness dressed up as acceptance. The difference is whether you actually inspected it.

Also — callbacks to our arc with Mónica Guzmán, why the Jordan Klepper problem matters, why Keith is deliberately getting worse at social media, and the sentence that names the whole arc: nothing that is conditioned is inevitable, and most of what we treat as inevitable is conditioned.

Part 1 of a multi-episode arc. Part 2 next week — the designers, the beneficiaries, and what we can actually do.

Key Topics: The "it is what it is" permission structure, capitulation vs. acceptance, cognitive load management, the boys-will-be-boys responsibility dodge, the sample-size fallacy in political comedy, and why the uneven weight of "it is what it is" hits harder when you're not in the dominant group.

Find Us: 🌐 https://www.moreincommonent.com 📸 https://www.instagram.com/moreincommonent 🐦 https://twitter.com/MoreInCommonent 📘 https://www.facebook.com/moreincommonpod

Gerren Taylor: 🎵 https://www.tiktok.com/@gerrent 💼 https://linkedin.com/in/gerrenT

Thinking out loud about what gets in the way of connection.

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