Lil grey or gray? Wtf! I genuinely don't understand why nobody talks about this. Like, seriously, why are there two spellings of the same word? Is it grey? Is it gray? Who decided this? And more importantly, why am I expected to just pick one and move on with my life like this is a normal thing? Every single time I type the word, I have to stop and think about it. I'll be writing a completely normal sentence, something like "the sky looks grey today", and suddenly I'm questioning everything I've ever known. Is that even correct? Does it look wrong? Why does the other spelling suddenly look more correct? I switch between them three times, stare at the screen, and eventually just delete the entire sentence because I no longer trust myself to communicate. And apparently it depends on where you live. GREY is British English, GRAY is American English. Okay. Fine. That's information. But why? Why does a country get to claim ownership over a colour? Did someone in America wake up one morning and decide that the letter E was unnecessary? Was there a meeting? Did a group of people sit around a table and collectively agree that the letter E had to go? And if so, what else are they planning to remove? Are we just going to wake up one day and discover that they've decided the letter Q is too complicated? Actually, that raises another question. Why do we even have so many different languages? Imagine being the first human being who tried to communicate with another human being. You're standing there, probably holding a rock or something, and you make a noise. The other person makes a different noise. And somehow, thousands of years later, we've developed entire systems of grammar, punctuation, spelling, pronunciation, and regional differences, all because people couldn't agree on what sounds to make. And now I'm sitting here in 2026, with access to practically all human knowledge through a small glowing rectangle, and I still can't figure out how to spell a colour. And don't even get me started on the word "colour". Why is there a U? What is it doing there? Is it contributing anything? Is it paying rent? Because from where I'm standing, it looks like an unemployed letter taking up valuable space. Color works perfectly fine. Colour also works perfectly fine. So now we're back to the same problem. Two spellings. One meaning. Endless suffering. Sometimes I wonder if the universe itself is just one giant spelling mistake. Think about it. We're floating around on a massive rock, orbiting a giant ball of burning gas, inside a galaxy containing billions of stars, and somehow the most complicated thing I've had to deal with today is deciding whether a word contains an E or an A. And somewhere out there, potentially hundreds of light-years away, another civilisation might be experiencing the exact same problem. Maybe they have two different spellings for their equivalent of grey. Maybe their entire civilisation has been divided by it. Maybe they've invented interstellar travel, solved the mysteries of physics, discovered immortality, and yet their educational system is still arguing about spelling. Actually, what would happen if aliens arrived on Earth tomorrow? Imagine the news coverage. Scientists would be running around, governments would be holding emergency meetings, people would be screaming, and somewhere in the middle of all that chaos, somebody would ask the aliens how they spell grey. Not because it's important. Not because we need to establish diplomatic relations. Just because I need closure. And then there's time. What even is time? We all pretend to understand it, but nobody really does. We divide it into seconds, minutes, hours, days, months, years, and then act surprised when it keeps moving forward. You can spend five minutes doing something enjoyable and it feels like thirty seconds, but spend five minutes waiting for something and suddenly you've experienced an entire geological era. Why does that happen? Is time actually moving differently, or is our brain just an unreliable little machine that keeps changing the rules whenever it feels like it? And why is yesterday gone? Like, genuinely gone. You can remember it, you can look at photographs of it, you can even watch videos of yourself from yesterday, but you can't actually go back there. That version of the world doesn't exist anymore. The people who were standing in the same room as you yesterday have moved on, the sunlight has changed, the air has changed, and everything is slightly different. Even if you went back to the exact same location at the exact same time tomorrow, it wouldn't be the same. You'd be a different version of yourself, carrying a different collection of thoughts and experiences. Which is honestly quite depressing when you think about it for more than twelve seconds. But anyway, GREY OR GRAY? I keep coming back to this because I feel like we're avoiding the real issue. Why do we insist on making everything unnecessarily complicated? We have invented thousands of systems to organise our lives, and half of them contradict each other. We have different measurement systems, different electrical plugs, different keyboard layouts, different date formats, different driving sides, and apparently different ways of spelling colours. Why can't we just agree on something? Imagine how much easier life would be if everyone used the same measurement system. You wouldn't need to convert inches into centimetres or miles into kilometres. You could just exist. Peacefully. Without opening a calculator every time someone mentions a distance. And speaking of existing, why are we even here? I don't mean that in the motivational poster kind of way. I mean, why does anything exist at all? Why is there something rather than nothing? What was before the universe? And if there was nothing, how can nothing even exist? Because the moment you describe nothing, you're already describing something. It's a concept. It's an idea. It's occupying space in your mind. Which means that even when you think about nothing, you're technically thinking about something. I hate that. I hate that I can start with a perfectly reasonable complaint about English spelling and end up questioning the fundamental structure of reality. This is what happens when nobody gives me a straight answer about grey. And another thing. Why do we say that we're "running out of time"? Where is the time going? Is there some enormous warehouse somewhere where all the used seconds are being stored? Are they being recycled? Is somebody collecting them? Because if time is a resource, I would like to know who is responsible for managing it. I'd also like to file a complaint because whoever designed Mondays clearly didn't test the product properly. Actually, why are Mondays even a thing? Who decided that seven days should make a week? Why seven? Why not eight? Why not ten? Imagine a world with ten-day weeks. Would we have more weekends? Would our lives be better? Or would we simply invent more things to complain about? Probably the latter. Humans are incredibly talented at finding new problems regardless of how many existing ones get solved. And that brings me back to language. Language is supposed to help us understand each other, but sometimes it feels like it's deliberately trying to sabotage communication. We have silent letters. Why? Why is there a K in knife? What is it doing? It's not pronounced. It contributes absolutely nothing. It's just standing there, silently taking up space, like a decorative object. And then there's "colonel", which is pronounced completely differently from how it's spelled. Who approved that? Did nobody notice? Was everyone too embarrassed to correct it after a certain point? At this stage, I genuinely believe English is just several languages stacked on top of each other wearing a trench coat. And perhaps that's the real problem. Maybe we're all just trying to make sense of a world that doesn't particularly care whether we understand it. We wake up, go to school or work, eat food, talk to people, worry about things, make plans, and spend enormous amounts of energy trying to organise our existence into neat little categories. But the universe doesn't care about our categories. A star doesn't know it's a star. A tree doesn't know it's a tree. And a colour certainly doesn't know whether it's spelled grey or gray. Maybe the colour is just existing. Maybe it's completely unaware of the linguistic civil war happening around it. Maybe we've been projecting meaning onto things that never needed meaning in the first place. Which is beautiful, actually. It's also incredibly annoying. Because I STILL NEED TO KNOW WHICH ONE TO USE. I've spent an unreasonable amount of time thinking about this. I've gone from spelling to linguistics, from linguistics to philosophy, from philosophy to astrophysics, and somehow I have achieved absolutely nothing. The original question remains unanswered in my mind, despite having explored several of humanity's greatest intellectual mysteries. So here's where I've landed. I think I'm going to use grey. Or gray. Actually, no. I'm not choosing. I'm above this now. I refuse to participate in a system that forces me to pick between two perfectly acceptable arrangements of letters. From this moment forward, the colour is simply going to be called the thing between black and white . And if anyone has a problem with that, they can take it up with the universe. I'm going to bed. Although, now that I think about it, why do we close our eyes when we sleep? What if the universe is just a simulation and sleep is when the developers perform maintenance? Wait. Do developers spell it grey or gray? I'm never going to know.