From Eugenia Cheng’s “The Joy of Abstraction,” arguably the finest general-audience math book written in the recent past:
Subtlety and nuance are aspects of thinking that I find myself missing and longing for in daily life. So much of our discourse has become black-and-white in futile attempts to be decisive, or to grab attention, or to make devastating arguments, or to shout down the opposition. Higher-dimensional category theory trains us in balancing nuance with rigor so that we don’t need to resort to black-and-white, and so that we don’t want to either.
I think mathematics is a spectacular controlled environment in which to practice this kind of thinking. The aim is that even if the theory is not directly applicable in the rest of our lives, the thinking becomes second nature. This is how I have found category theory to help me in everyday life, surprising though it may sound.
Abhijnan Rej 