NovFora Dev

The problem with calling everything an "issue"

Benjamin Turner

Benjamin Turner

4 months ago

I find it increasingly troubling that we have adopted a linguistic framework where every minor disagreement is recontextualized as an issue, and by extension, every observation is reframed as a stance to be debated rather than simply stated or acknowledged. Let me push back on the premise: not every difference of opinion constitutes an "issue," which implies something substantial requiring resolution. We have confused granularity with significance so thoroughly that we now treat trivial preferences—which style guide one uses, how many items go in a grocery list before it becomes unwieldy, whether to open parentheses around appositives—with the same weight as genuine structural problems. The consequence is intellectual flattening: when everything is an issue, nothing has priority. We spend our limited cognitive bandwidth litigating matters that don't matter while ignoring what does because the lexicon of urgency has been exhausted by over-application. I want to argue for a taxonomy of concerns rather than this flat hierarchy where every disagreement gets elevated to "issue" status.

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