Is It Though?

by | Mar 12, 2025 | Article, Experiences, Making Meaning

Is It Though?

One of the most important skills in life, and one that is too often unaddressed in education these days, is critical thinking. It’s one of the skills that set us apart from current computing tools (like AI/ML). It’s one of 8 skills needed for the future that will serve people their entire lives.

If you ask an AI about critical thinking, it will tell you something like the following:

Critical thinking skills:

  • Ask questions: Be curious and inquisitive, and ask questions to better understand a situation.
  • Analyze: Break down information into parts and structures to identify similarities and differences.
  • Evaluate: Judge the credibility of a source and determine if evidence supports a conclusion.
  • Infer: Draw conclusions based on the information you have.
  • Make decisions: Use logical reasoning and analytical skills to make informed choices.

But, this is like a recipe that only lists ingredients. How do you think more critically? Which questions should you be asking?

I’ve found a simple way to blend critical thinking into your daily life and your interactions with others and media. It’s one simple, but powerful, question: Is it though?

Whenever you hear someone say something, quickly ask this question to yourself (no need to be an annoying tool that questions everyone, all of the time). If the answer feels more like “yes,” no questioning needed. If the answer feels more like “no,” that’s the signal that something requires more engagement and thought. Whether you do it right then and there is up to you. And, many statements aren’t binarily right or wrong (“it depends” is perfectly reasonable). However, this is a quick way to gauge the veracity of what you’ve encountered.

Of course, you “gut” may not always be right. We’re all fallible. But, listening and thinking critically isn’t about perfection but approaching the world with an open, but critical, mind. You don’t need to read a book on critical thinking or enroll in a course (though you can, obviously, learn a lot more about it if you do). Over time, your gut instincts improve with critical thinking, particularly when you make a point to follow-up with facts you’ve researched. Truth, here is your friend even if it goes against what you think should be correct.

The reason why this question works so well is it isn’t necessarily confrontational or argumentative (in the colloquial sense). It’s simply an opening to whether the reverse is more true, less true, just as true, or something else entirely. It’s not as if you’re blurting out “that can’t be right!” even if you feel that strongly.

It can be a lot of mental overhead, of course. But, you don’t have to linger on every statement (and question) and, once you’ve gained some practice, it becomes almost second nature to intuitively surf a conversation with a part of your mind using a critical filter. You can make a mental note to follow-up later or even jot down a quick note in text to refere to later.

When you do engage and even stop the conversation for clarity or more details, this is your opportunity to take another’s point of view: “why did they say this? Do they really believe it? If so, what makes them think this way? If not, what rewards their debate or even dishonesty?” This is the next level of critical thinking and it requires you to briefly reframe the conversation from their perspective. This, too, is an important skill. Debate clubs thrive on members being able to switch perspectives and argue against what they personally believe. Being able to craft a credible message despite your own opinion is an excellent skill but it’s not one you need to develop. Simply being able to empathize in order to understand is one of the most important critical thinking skills. Those who can’t are limited in ways they don’t even recognize.

When you’re able to see more than one perspective and understand other’s points of view, you quickly see that there are rarely two valid opinions. The world is seldom binary. One of the biggest failures of modern news in any medium is that insistence that there are two sides to every story, when there are likely many more than two that are relevant. Being able to see other perspectives is your superpower to see other solutions. This is called reframing and it’s the chief skill of design thinking. When you can transcend either/or, you can understand both/and (that’s the essence of game theory right there) or heywhatabout! Perhaps (or mostly), your choices are more than merely 1 or 2. Maybe number 16 is the real solution! You’re never going to find it unless you build a capacity to see those different frames (this is also the essence of systems thinking).

One warning, however: while most critical thinkers seek truth and rational thought, what we describe as “rational” (and not) is important. Your feelings aren’t irrational, despite too many people calling emotions irrational. If something makes you happy, scared, sad, proud, angry, etc. and you take action accordingly, that is entirely rational! It may not be visible (to you or others) but it’s a rational response. If I buy a red convertible instead of the sober sedan I went into the dealership for, originally, that’s not irrational. I may not have been conscious of the exchange (this car for feeling more successful, virile, youthful, etc.) but that was a rational exchange of value. It may have been subconscious (to me, it surely wasn’t to the salesperson in the dealership), but it’s no less rational. Irrationality describes actions and reactions that don’t connect. If you jump or cower in fear when you hear a dog suddenly bark, that may, at first, seem “irrational” to someone who doesn’t know that you were attacked by a dog when you were 5 years old, but once they do, they understand that your reaction is rational.

This isn’t to say that thinking logically isn’t important. It is—critically. Logic is the basis of rational thinking. It’s just that numbers aren’t the only logical currency. Emotions, values, core meanings, etc. are all part of the landscape of logic, too.

This is why the word “feeling” is so important and helpful in critical thinking. You won’t have time to look up facts or sequence every if/then possibility. Your feelings whether something is closer to true than false is what you’ll primarily use to navigate conversations or other forms of learning. You still need to follow-up, later, on those things that didn’t make sense. But, unless you’re particularly terrible at judging opinions or character (and, some people are), your intuition is the only timely way to thinking critically in the world.

Once you get used to running a routine on the side of your brain that constantly, intermittently asks “is it though?” you are in a position to question your own biases. It’s worth looking up the many ways we can fool ourselves if we’re not paying attention to our own opinions and behaviors.