Life Less Overwhelming: A Grey Area Initiative To Help Everyday People

Written By Jimmy Grey

When I got back from Ukraine in 2022, I wanted to burn the whole fucking world down. Friends deleted me on social media left and right for posting things too brutal. More people chose to argue conspiracy theories with me than ask me if I was doing okay.

I didn't expect a hero's welcome. Nor did I want one. But I didn't expect to go through PTSD alone either. Nor did I want to.

I'm still pissed. But not so much anymore.

Recently, this past year, I attended my 10 year university reunion. It was special. It was fun being 21 again. But behind all the sunshine and rainbows, I heard stories of both struggle and hope.

Some fellow alumni were making $22 an hour while living in San Francisco. Starvation wage for that city. If their car breaks down, they have absolutely no plan.

I started to understand why so people didn't care for my humanitarian content. They were simply struggling to stay afloat. They had no cognitive energy left to spend on international tragedies. This realization made me a bit ashamed for being so self-righteous.

My classmates were not callous, uncaring people. One girl I haven't seen since Freshmen year volunteered every Saturday picking up trash on the highway.

In some ways, volunteering every Saturday to pick up trash alone on the highway beats a few weeks in a war zone. It is monotonous, just as risky, and it doesn't come with any glory.

These are good, kind, caring people. And if I can't bring value to their lives, why should they spend their mental health on the things I care about?

So one of the things I want to do is to figure out how I can make life less overwhelming for regular people.

In modern times, there are so many things demanding our attention and energy that it's causing a worldwide mental health crisis. From finances to work emails, from relationships to social media, from political crisis after political crisis...people are drained to their limits.

Grey area thinking is about navigating complexities. About finding balance within chaos. It's about replacing antiquated systems with processes that flow and make sense.

Thus, my vision for Path of Grey is for us to take on projects that reduce friction in people's lives.

This can be something as simple as coming up with grey life hacks. Or it can be more lofty goals such as building grey organizations or working towards systematic social change.

I believe the right strategy to approach this initiative is to start with communication. How do we get people to visualize healthy and broken systems? If we can do that, the sky is limit for us in spreading the values of grey thinking.

Please check out the Grey Information Design Project (Coming Soon).