My opinion on opinions

I don’t know anything about anything. And I’ll be the first to admit that.

Maybe that’s not completely true, or at least I couldn’t live a functional life believing it was. But I do think there’s a certain virtue in pleading ignorance that seems to be lost today.

Everyone has an opinion on every little issue nowadays. And they’re not quiet about it either.

Maybe there’s always been this sort of societal pressure to form opinions on issues they’re uninformed about. Harry Frankfurt explains this phenomenon in his 1986 essay, “On Bullshit”:

There is a “widespread conviction that it is the responsibility of a citizen in a democracy to have opinions about everything, or at least everything that pertains to the conduct of his country’s affairs.”

And I know that probably every generation believes that they are the exception, having it worse in some way or another. I’m also going to fall victim to that trap and make the claim that people today have an especially high societal pressure to form opinions. And I think we may need to think a bit more seriously about those consequences.

On social media, it has become the norm to voice your opinion on anything and everything. This creates an onslaught of opinions that pressures people into taking a stance on every little issue that happens to be headline news.

But there’s a caveat! Headline news only last so long, and you better not miss out! If you don’t share your opinion before America’s ADD pulls our collective attention onto the next story, you may as well go stand in the corner, head down, with the other unopinionated losers.

It’s clearly not an environment for rational, nuanced opinion.

Misinformation is the most obvious flaw in the system. With every Joe, Deb, and Harry sharing uneducated opinions, social media becomes ripe for the spread of misinformation. To add on top, real expert opinions either get lost in the shuffle or devalued completely.

It’s a hodgepodge of screwed-up factors that’s led to our current situation: where it’s almost expected for people to tout uninformed, yet stubbornly held opinions on issues they most likely have nothing to do with. And if you don’t form an opinion… “what are you, IGNORANT?!”

Here are some things I think we should all consider:

Our opinions are optional

We need to remind ourselves that the world won’t end because we don’t have an opinion on an issue.

People seem to feel some sort of moral responsibility to form opinions on any matter they learn about. But if we believe our opinions truly matter (which we should), maybe we consider something else:

Maybe the morally responsible option isn’t to form half-baked public opinions. Maybe, ignorance isn’t so bad after all — at least until you can learn some more (but for some issues, maybe it’s better off to never form an opinion at all).

Because the only way to make a real change in the world is by taking action. And we can only really focus our action on a few particular issues before spreading ourselves too thin.

On issues that fall outside our realm of focus, maybe we’re better off leaving it to the experts.

Our opinions have consequences

Every once in a while, I think we all need to remind ourselves what an opinion even is.

“The weather is bad” is an opinion. “It is raining” is an objective fact.

That’s not to say our opinions are unimportant because they’re not necessarily “reality”. Actually the opposite; our opinions shape how we view the world. That’s why it’s so important that we take a step back and think about whether our opinions are working for or against us.

Because if we hold negative opinions, we’ll see the world in a negative way. This sentiment is stated so well in Shakespeare’s Hamlet:

“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”

It’s why we need to carefully consider every opinion we hold.

People also commonly form opinions on things that have nothing to do with them. Be careful of this:

When we do this, we take things that are originally outside of our reality and make them our problem. We’re only hurting ourselves, and most likely not achieving any real good on behalf of the matter.

“You always have the option of having no opinion. There is never any need to get worked up or to trouble your soul about things you can’t control. These things are not asking to be judged by you. Leave them alone.” — Marcus Aurelius