I used to say it all the time. Why is everyone making this so complicated? It’s just common sense.

I recall once whining in more or less that vein to a colleague. His response set me aback. “One person’s common sense,” he said, “is another person’s uncommon nonsense.” He drew air quotes around the word uncommon.

As it turns out, the problem with appeals to common sense rests in those two words: common and sense.

Dealing with sense first, I’ve learned that in a complex, fast-moving world, making sense of things doesn’t often turn into an easy affair. But who defined what made sense? Who prescribed what should make sense to all or a majority thereof?

Perhaps once, when society moved along shared, simpler norms, finding sense we could agree on needed only a little more work than inhaling deeply. Perhaps on a localized level, in insular communities, sense fell off trees. But was it ever that straightforward? When dealing with other communities, did the same sense keep popping up?

That leads us to the common part. I don’t know how things worked back then, but today we stand so polarized, so prone to disagreement, that we share little in common. We can point to so few things we can claim to have in common. Increasingly, it seems sense isn’t one of them. Indeed, in an age of increasing individualism and niche fortification, can we really claim we ever do much motivated by a common understanding? At a time when so many of us say, “well, that may work for you, but it’s no good for me,” can we claim a thing as lofty as common sense?

Personally, I’ve given up on appeals to common sense. Instead, I keep searching and fine-tuning my understanding of an overarching, Standard sense, one that stands above and stretches beyond my imperfect opinions and biases, and which persists unhindered by the ever-shifting whims of common, public wisdom.