It’s all relative.

I remember sitting in the back seat of our family’s Subaru station wagon. I was six and this was long before child carseats were a thing. My dad was at the wheel and my mom played 20 Questions with me while we drove to some vacation spot I can’t even remember.

It was my mom’s turn as she and I played 20 Questions. She had an object in mind and I was asking the questions.

“Is it big?” I asked.

“Relative to what?” my mom replied.

This was the pattern throughout the entire game. I asked a question and my mom answered with a question about relativity.

“You can ask questions when it’s my turn to think of an object,” I’d say.

“If you’re asking if the thing is as big as a mountain, the answer is no. But next to ant, yes, it is big.”

This year has been a long stretch of re-learning what it means to think relatively. How long of a stretch? It’s relative, I suppose. But as 2020 comes to a close, I can almost hear my mom asking me the same question, whether it’s at work or in my personal life.

“Relative to what?” she asks.

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My mind jumps to relative units in CSS when I hear the word “relative.” I’m sure many of you are the same. I reach for things like em, rem and % all the time in my work. I only started using them to be cool when I first learned about them (whenever that was). I didn’t even know there was a real difference between em and rem. I thought they had something to do with retina screens.

Of course, that was a long time ago. (How long? It’s relative.) I now know that relative units are relative to the thing they reference. 2rem is going to evaluate one way on a site with a root font size of 16px and another for a site at 24px. Same deal with percentages. 50% inside a 400px container means something different than 50% inside a 1200px container.

So, now, when I find myself assigning size values to elements, I first have a little dialogue with my mom.

“This element is 5.25em.”

“Relative to what?” she asks.

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I’ve also learned that thinking relatively requires a little perspective. And, no, this has nothing to do with CSS perspective (although I could probably try to make that connection). Thinking in relative terms means momentarily stepping out of your own shoes and seeing things from something else’s vantage point.

I say “something” because I think about this most when writing code. Whenever I’m working on the pieces of a component, I have to be mindful of the context—or perspective—of where they sit. Why? Because the pieces mean different things in different contexts and those contexts are relative to the component that contains them.

When is an <h2> just an <h2>? Hardly ever. It might be the post name. Or perhaps the heading for a widget. Maybe it’s the heading for a card component. As front-enders, we name those things according to the perspective of the component. From the perspective of a post, an <h2> means (and probably looks) something different from the perspective of, say, a card.

.post {}
.post__title {}

.widget {}
.widget__title {}

.card {}
.card__title {}

Naming things is hard. I often find myself thinking, “Ack! What the heck should I call this thing?”

“Relative to what?” my mom interjects.

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I could go on and on. The truth is that thinking in terms of relativity is just as important to the code we write as it is to a game of 20 Questions, or even our personal lives. And in a year where we’ve been upended by so many competing forces, thinking along these lines can offer solace and wisdom in the midst of what has been stressful and frustrating for many of us—relatively, of course.

It’s easy to get caught up in absolutes. Relativity forces us to see things differently.